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posted by n1 on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:52AM   Printer-friendly

MIT News reports that Seymour Papert, one of the founders of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and the MIT Media Lab, and the inspiration for LEGO Mindstorms, has died.

Papert's career traversed a trio of influential movements: child development, artificial intelligence, and educational technologies. Based on his insights into children's thinking and learning, Papert recognized that computers could be used not just to deliver information and instruction, but also to empower children to experiment, explore, and express themselves. The central tenet of his Constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. As early as 1968, Papert introduced the idea that computer programming and debugging can provide children a way to think about their own thinking and learn about their own learning.

[...] Papert's life straddled several continents. He was born in 1928 in Pretoria, South Africa, and went on to study at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, where he earned a BA in philosophy in 1949, followed by a PhD in mathematics three years later. He was a leading anti-apartheid activist throughout his university years.

Papert's studies then took him overseas – first to Cambridge University in England from 1954-1958, where he focused on math research, earning his second PhD, then to the University of Geneva, where he worked with Swiss philosopher and psychologist Jean Piaget, whose theories about the ways children make sense of the world changed Papert's view of children and learning.

From Switzerland, Papert came to the U.S., joining MIT as a research associate in 1963. Four years later, he became a professor of applied mathematics, and shortly after was appointed co-director of the Artificial Intelligence Lab (which later evolved into the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL) by its founding director Professor Marvin Minsky. Together, they wrote the 1969 book, "Perceptrons," which marked a turning point in the field of artificial intelligence.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 02 2016, @11:36AM (#383061)

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