Games as Construction Zones

Dr. Idit Harel Caperton spoke to simSchool from China, where she is engaged this fall in developing a project-based software-engineering program for graduate students at East China Normal University in Shanghai.

simSchool: When did you first become aware of the learning potential of games and simulations and what was it that piqued your interest?

IHC: Many child psychologists, the media, parents and other experts are interested in the idea of children's play and games. We know that children naturally learn as they play. And while most play is good, there is some that more strongly engages the child in the most powerful form of learning I know: constructionist learning. My work has been involved in looking at how children learn and discover and how knowledge develops in children and in adults. I include adults because what is true about learning for children is also true for adults.

For the past 25 years, I have been studying and implementing theories of child development and epistemology and how children develop concepts and cognitive capacities. It was meeting Seymour Papert that first pulled me into seriously researching how children learn using computers. Papert understood very early on, already back in the late 60's and 70's, that technology could provide children with new ways to think and learn. In the 80's, he pioneered the term "Constructionism," for his learning theory which basically claims that children learn best when they are in active roles of designers and constructors. Inspired by Jean Piaget, he believes that children “learn best by making and inventing things." Papert went beyond Piaget to include the idea that learning takes root when children use computational tools to share what they have made and also share the process of how they made it. I was strongly inspired by Papert who puts a high value on social learning processes and having children activate their own minds and also make or construct things to shape their learning. This is why he termed his theory constructionism not constructiVism.

simSchool: Papert is also known as the creator of Logo. What is the value of Logo in this context of our discussion?

IHC: Papert also lead the team that created a programming language called Logo. He saw Logo as “playful learning” tool and as a computational environment that embodied his progressive, playful and fun constructionist educational philosophy. In the early days, Logo was like an intelligent toy – a programmable robotic turtle for exploring geometry and mathematical concepts in a radically new way; it stood on the floor and kids or adults directed it to move around by typing commands at the computer to which it was connected. The playful, robotic turtle later migrated into the virtual world –and found a much more comfortable, scaleable, sustainable, and flexible position on the computer screen – where it has been used to date by millions of young learners to program computer graphics, draw shapes, designs, and pictures, create animated stories, construct representations of physical phenomena, build simulations, compose music, and used for kids to make their own interactive games. There’s lots of information about it on the Logo Foundation website that Michael Tempel runs, and on the Papert website that we built together back in the 90’s.

	For the past 25 years, I have been studying and implementing theories of child development and epistemology and how children develop concepts and cognitive capacities.

simSchool: Logo was an early innovation that opened up new ways for children to explore, construct and learn using computers. Can you tell us more about your early years working with Papert and other pioneers?

IHC: So this is how I got sucked into it.... I was a Masters student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education back in 1982 and 1983 and 1984, when there were a number of academic pioneers who started to explore this new domain, professors like David Perkins and Judah Schwartz. Our Ed-tech research in the '80's, especially with disadvantaged kids, already told us that the real power of technology is in the development of learners’ active engagement in learning. ...continue