Seymour Papert: Constructionism & Logo

🐢🧱💻🧑‍🏫 Meet the MIT mathematician who pioneered AI, developed Logo, and founded Constructionism.

Seymour Papert (1928–2016) was a mathematician, computer scientist, and educator — a founder of the MIT AI Lab (with Marvin Minsky) and of the MIT Media Lab. He studied with Jean Piaget in Geneva and extended Piaget's constructivism into Constructionism: the idea that people learn best by building personally meaningful things.

He co-created the Logo programming language and its Turtle, and his book Mindstorms (1980) reimagined how children could learn powerful ideas through "hard fun" in microworlds. (LEGO Mindstorms is named for it.)