as 1995 and we were really driven to bring constructionism to the home we all of a sudden realized that actually parents and grandparents have an opportunity that they don't know really very much in boxes they're very much into standards there can be as bad some home environments are as bad as schools and how do you really tweak that and create the constructionist mindset the creative mindset the idea that you can really learn more by connecting all these islands of knowledge and as parents what do you do and I think it was really interesting to see him struggling with the same ideas when he was out there all of a sudden in the mid late 90s trying to think about well there's so much work to do also when the computers are in the home and just like in schools there were the work that he did with Cynthia Salomon and all the work about the creative teachers of the 60s and the 70s and even early 80s when they were like the rebels who were just doing this there's some parents who are like that too Valor you want to jump in? I just want to mention a couple of things about the democratizing aspect I think the two very important developments and opportunities for this to happen one is that as we were talking here just before there are thousands of maker spaces popping up everywhere in every country in public and private schools of course they're much more concentrated in private schools but those are spaces where different kinds of learning happen and differently from when you take a few robotic kids to a school and run a workshop those are permanent places where you cannot really lecture them they're just not meant for lecturing so this is a really important opportunity because now we have a place for constructionism which is fixed and it exists permanently in schools and the second opportunity is that many countries periodically they revise their national curricula and I know that the board curricula here might make you start shaking and throwing eggs at me but so countries do revise their national curricula every 5-10 years and many of them have added project based learning coding and all of that the whole entire countries that are considering adding and states in the US programming and all of that I know that a lot of times they lead to over standardization to terrible kinds of projects and all of that but they are an opportunity for us to introduce in national policy and national curricula those kinds of things but we cannot let the policy makers say I'll take it from here let me design the curricula and the stuff we have to keep engaged with policy makers and all of that to make sure that it doesn't end up a horrible implementation of something so we need to think about those things because those things will not happen spontaneously and there is a big gap between all the very deep and profound ideas we are discussing here and making them happen in the real world and it's kind of dirty and satisfying work and it's not pure and it's not as deep and all of that but it's work that if we don't do it no one else will and I think it's really important and it's not just we it's the kids that were his hope I think the concept of child power and how maybe if we bring it to homes and we bring it to the public schools and to the masses eventually there will be a tipping point where it will not be about the governments it will be about the kids I think all PC was very much driven by that concept too and that if we if we can create this tipping point where kids can all of a sudden have power to say I want to learn music in my school or I'm not going to come I'm going to do certain things in my mathematics curriculum and connect it with music or with art or I'm just not going to do it and all the kids he has this image of all the kids kind of bunching together and really at the end that was his vision and I think it's absolutely going to happen when I begin to really work on larger scales in public school systems and you see the empowerment that all of a sudden kids really have confidence in themselves as learners they are in love with the objects of their creation all of a sudden they can take a stance and express themselves they feel that power and you're beginning to see them moving and I think as we are moving into this world of 1 billion 2 billion, 3 billion, 7 billion of people teaching one day, learning one day teaching one hour, learning one hour I think we're going to see that child power concept totally taking over so and that he envisioned this already 40, 50 years ago I think and I think that's what we're beginning to see already as we are planting the seeds of Seymour everywhere the revolution and the kids will drive it Hamiltonian, the learners the learners, the learners the learners of all ages well speaking of rising up we have to rise up now and go to lunch, rethinking lunch so thank you panelists for taking time, rise up we're ready to begin with our afternoon program and we'll start it off with another great video I think school generally is a little bit idea of this in mathematics it's almost entirely idea of this you learn skills how to do things even when you learn how to solve certain puzzle like problems you're never dealing with the ideas interesting our next speaker is Alan K not the survivalist Alan K not the teeny bopper disc jockey Murray the K and he is a former professional jazz guitarist composer, theatrical designer an amateur classic pipe organist which I did not know he did not invent the K Pro which I thought for many years he did it was my computer of choice so it's good to know that and his deep interest in developing children's learning and thinking via being inspired by Seymour in 1968 and learning logo where he says the catalysts for these ideas and they continue to make up the center of his research so here to address the topic rethinking ideas please welcome Alan K thank you thanks a lot and so Nicholas did his usual thing of taking something that was nicely homogenized together in Seymour's mind which are things about learning and things about ideas and things about teaching and things about math and so forth and broken them out into these separate sessions now the thing about ideas is that most ideas in mediocre down to bad and the problem is when people have them they are so excited to have an idea they tend to act and this explains this explains a lot of what has been going on in the world so one of the ways of counteracting that is we can have processes for debugging them and that's a powerful idea it's okay to have ideas if you have processes to debug that's kind of what science is science is a set of processes to get around of what's wrong with our brains and a powerful idea about the powerful idea is hey there are powerful ideas in one there are probably more and because they are powerful we should put some effort into trying to figure out what they are and to invent more so that's what we'll talk about in these few minutes and just taking one big one like writing and it speaks over distance and time but what's powerful about writing was unsuspected and that is it actually changes the way we actually think it's not just a transliteration of an oral mode of thought it actually creates co-creates new modes of thought and this is why writing is associated with every civilization that we know we don't know of a civilization based on oral modes of thought and the powerful idea about that is well we should be able to invent more qualitative thought vehicles and we have math, science some of the ideas I'll talk about in a second so this last year has been a devastating year for some of the greats in thinking about powerful ideas we lost Marvin one of his favorite sayings was you don't understand something if you only understand it one way we lost Jerome Bruner made it to 100 and he was still vital said any subject can be taught in an intellectually honest form if we heed their level of development that is something that Marvin believed and that's something that Seymour believed and we lost Seymour who had a wide variety I picked one that I was sure was going to be used already and it was that is a reflection on the difference between learning something in a class and learning something as part of a culture and I'll come back to that towards the end Marvin also like to say that school is the best thing ever invented to keep you from thinking about something important for more than a few minutes and if Marvin were here right now he would say well a short talk is the same think about it and in fact think about where we are we are in a forum idolizing rightly a person who didn't believe in the direct classroom process and yet we've had one thing after another and you're sitting out there so the ironies are delicious here Jerry Bruner said the most neglected big idea is the very idea the bigness of ideas it's hard for people to even deal with a powerful idea in taking in what the power is because the power is often a power of changing the context and you can't fully appreciate the new idea in the old context and Seymour had a great line he said the scandal of education is that every time you teach something which is what I'm trying to do here wrongly you defy the learner of the pleasure and benefit of discovery and so his idea and the idea of Montessori and many other great educators is to set up the conditions so the people don't have to invent difficult things completely from scratch but so that the important parts of the learning are done by them and not by trying to force them to remember something and in fact here's maybe a better metaphor for what we're doing because it kind of looks like this at a camp campfire you're waiting for me to tell stories because that's what oral modes of thought are about and yet we live in a civilization that was made by finding stronger ways of thinking than oral modes think about that and of course Seymour was here he would say hey wait this is bullshit let's do a workshop of some kind and the reason he would say that is that our languages are primarily made for stories and the way the words work in languages is they set up categories the categories tend to be antagonistic to each other and so right away you're in a problem if you're trying to think of things in terms of language trying to explain things in terms of language the language can do a few things for you but not the other and so I would like you to pick your reality kit up let's do something where we all actually do something and now you can open it okay just do what it says and if you watch me one of the ways of doing it is holding it up like this and moving it in slowly so about 9 inches from your face you'll see something interesting so you cover your right eye look at the plus with your left eye and move your head in anybody see it so this is something that good thinkers do at least once a day it's the equivalent of yoga for the mind okay and so the next question is what did you see where the dot was did you see nothing was there nothing there what did you see or did you see something like this where did that text come from think about it that dot went away it was always on the page and suddenly you saw stuff that could not possibly be there so here's what's going on that inside your eye and we have among the stupidest designed eyes in the animal kingdom because unlike the eyes of a squid which have the blood vessels on the back of the retina our particular path of evolution and if you ever talk to a person who hasn't thought much about evolution this is a good one squids have good eyes but nature for our eyes most mammalian eyes have the blood vessels on the front and so the light actually has to go through the blood vessels and your brain actually subtracts it out so you have less acuity there than you think and where the blood vessels come in is there are no light sensitive cells at all and to the side is where most of the light sensitive cells is about a million pixels there and you're legally blind out in the periphery and here's what happens when you move the paper in you move it in until the dot gets where there are no cells and it winks out and if you had a good brain it would show you nothing but because you have a brain that insists on projecting its view of reality on the world what it's doing is filling in with the stuff that is around it and so what you're actually seeing is nothing that was on your retina you're seeing a complete recreation through the knowledge that you have cool huh so we have a blind spot and what's the powerful idea about it we can't learn to see until we realize we're blind because otherwise we say seeing is believing McLuhan said I can't see something until I believe it that's much more the case and the powerful idea about that is it makes a huge difference if ideas are experienced in as many ways as possible because this makes it much more difficult for our brains to fool us in what it is that we think we're seeing and of course seeing is a metaphor for thinking now here's a different powerful idea is an invention called human rights and it brings the hidden to light powerful ideas take you from knowing something which is what schools tend to teach to insight those of us who knew Seymour and loved him and Marvin I can't think of the two apart they were such an influence on us this is what they were fantastic at the way they liked to understand things were in insightful ways and if they didn't understand something in an insightful way they put in the effort to try and find an insight and these insights are just completely mind blowing because every single one of them like great art his job is to take us out of thinking we're in reality and to show us that there's a larger reality in chamber music they have this wonderful thing saying which is climbing the mountain the reward is to see the higher mountains and that's what these guys did for us powerful ideas create new context for thinking and powerful ideas can be very difficult to learn and partly because many of them require the context to be changed people tend to be conservative on their context I first met Marvin in 1968 when I was a graduate student he gave a talk out where I went to school on education and if you'd like to read this talk it's more or less what he wrote up a couple of years later for his touring award lecture very similar to it and it was full of Papert and Piaget and as Marvin said in his touring award lecture Papert's ideas pervade this essay and part of it was the ideas about children of a certain level of development when looking at water poured from the same glass into a tall thin glass I think there's more water there and some children realize that the water is the same and they will come to different conclusions at different ages but also come to different conclusions if you then cover the tall thin glass so this malleability of what we think reality is is something that cognitive psychology was very strongly about in the 50s and 60s another one is when you make something twice as large it goes up by 4 by the square and if you make an odd shape twice as large its volume goes up by a factor of 8 so these things where our brains are terrible at making estimates of things and this is so interesting that I resolved to go visit Seymour and I first visited I think in the fall of 68 and then a few times thereafter I visited Seymour and Seymour were working with children roughly the age of 12 or so there and it was just mind blowing fascinating and in a special way which I'll try and explain in a second so here's what I remember of the syntax of that old logo there's something like that remember that I love this stuff the turtle was a great idea the problem was that it was difficult for people to handle all the things that logo was really wonderful at helping you think at and this was a casualty so this is a nice little program that 12 year olds can write that will turn any English sentence into a piglet and they did many other kinds of things like that and Wally Fertzig who is one of the developers to talk about this so I commend this to you if you're interested and Nicholas mentioned the turtle there here's what it actually looked like it's about this big not terribly accurate it had a magic marker and you ran it around on butcher paper and this is an area and I think the center of this talk is what I'm going to say next about this which is to try to get in the short time I have a little more of an understanding of how large Seymour's ideas were here just why it was so critically important I believe this is the tragedy of logo is that in many ways what was really important about it was people were distracted by for instance that the turtle can make a picture and many installations of logo in schools the teachers had sort of devolved down to just having the kids draw things with the turtle and that was so far from what the idea was so I had a hard time figuring out how to do this but here's the thing that Nicholas mentioned that Seymour would take a kid and say cover your eyes and make a circle with your body and so the kid would do something like this and what are you doing and the only way to explain this is to make a kind of a constellation of ideas I hate bullets and talks but I just couldn't find a way of not doing it so what the kid is doing is actually this because the turtle and the kid are actually a kind of a vector in a kind of mathematics that wasn't invented until the 19th century the kid doesn't know it and doesn't care and doesn't need to know but the kid is doing it and doing this sequentially is adding these things together and you get something like a circle and if you ask the kid what they're doing they say well I'm going a little turning a little over and over and that is almost a logo program if you put it in there a logo will do it and depending on what a little means you'll get something that's more like a polygon or more like a circle so any child can make a better circle out of a polygon than Archimedes could and what's the significance here and the significance is going to run around this slide here well we've got three main kinds of brains for doing thinking we have a body brain that body brain knew how to do a circle even though the kid couldn't tell you it beforehand the kid was able to give the explanation after the eye brain registers what the thing is configuration and the symbolic language brain is a way of expressing something in a way that can be generalized and so you have these multiple descriptions and multiple ways of thinking combined in this simple little exercise that he did and what's cool about it is the extension of this this is cool enough, right because already you're getting a kid to do something and you have to do circles with x squared plus y squared equals r squared try and get a computer to draw a circle with that so concrete abstractions the abstractions are things here they're not off here it's relational but it's also procedural relations are what you can see with your eye and the procedure is what you do with your body so you've got two ways of thinking of geometry now, not just one what this is in adult language is what's called a differential geometry of vectors that happens to be one of the main mathematical languages for all of physical sciences it's what is actually used in favor of standard calculus it's a powerful form an extension of what calculus and geometry originally invented to do embodied in something that is in the wheelhouse of a young child and the child can now do real math because this is a form of thinking that the child can have intuitions about, can do real science can do real computing and we get some powerful, so these are powerful ideas in what the kid is doing now let's extend it out one of the implications here is hey you can start a lot earlier you can start many cases you can start something that involves ideas like calculus used in a cognitive understanding way ten years before calculus is normally used because you don't have to have analytic geometry and you don't have to have algebra Albert North Whitehead said in 1916 that to an address to the mathematical association in UK, he was a great mathematician and he said the tragedy of our times is that calculus is so easy but you have to go through algebra to get to it and the thing is is that calculus does not have anything particularly to do with algebra at all it's a different set of ideas, it's primarily has to do with forms of sequences and additions and additions are what our brains are set up and made for another implication here is real forms of many other powerful ideas can be found that this is actually expressing now something that could be a goal and a purpose, if we want to improve education with children let's not try to teach them watered down adult ideas, what we want is the full power of the adult ideas but put in a form that the children's brains can deal with, you see what the difference is there, it's profound the watered down ideas aren't the thing anymore they just become bullshit but if you can hold on to the full power of what's going on here and make it so a child can start working on it you're putting the child in the real world and the cosmic ideas are what Mitchell used the word epistemological which Seymour used a lot I believe it was a mistake for Seymour to use that word and after this election I'm convinced it's a mistake to use any words that long but it's hard to find a good word short words epistemology is kind of a stance of knowledge of the way you think about the world you're in it's very hard to use circumlocutions for it but what's cool here is that whatever it is it's the version of reality that you retreat to when you're in trouble and so if you learn a common sense version of reality and try to tack science on it when you're older, when you get in trouble you tend to think in these terms that are not going to give you good intuitions where if you learn the powerful ideas early you will retreat to intuitions that are likely to help you a lot more so this is the cosmic idea here and my way of expressing this is point of view is worth ADIQ points by taking the right stance and looking at things all of a sudden it's like you put an extra little brain in your head you're suddenly much smarter much more capable than the geniuses of antiquity just because you have a better perspective to look at things so to summarize all this up I had to do something after all that there because it's a lot of stuff but I can tell you my mind was completely and part of the reason my mind was blown was what I just told you but the other thing and I can see Hal here nodding away everybody who's been through this experience here's the thing every single one of us knew this ahead of time we just didn't know it every computer person everybody who has science knows every goddamn thing here Seymour didn't show me anything I didn't know I just had never thought about what it implied for children that was the thing I'm getting chills just thinking about I can remember this moment for the rest of my life I've realized oh my god I just found a blind spot my brain was filling in the wrong thing so when a child is born they're not born into nothing they're born into something like a culture and so one of Seymour's favorite metaphors was the baby who brought up in France will easily learn to fluence not just fluently speak but to do French to be French and the reason is we're genetically set up for just like we're genetically set up for language we're not so genetically set up to learn a language in a classroom or a culture in a classroom we're terrible at it but put us into a culture and we can't help but accommodate to it that is the way we were set up and Montessori was perhaps the first great education that realized this she said you cannot teach the 20th century in a classroom the school has to be the 20th century that's a powerful idea and so to the culture that we have been brought up in we add a bunch of things we live we're born in a world that realizes there is a world some of us that the world is embedded in an enormous universe that there are social systems it's not just reality you only realize there's a social system when you come in contact with another one and you realize oh yeah they have this way and there are thousands of them that there are technological systems this is a self-portrait of the internet that we are a system this is very very recent modern medicine in many ways dates back certainly to the 20th century and much of it to the middle of the 20th century and that our mental apparatus emotional and intellectual are systems and these systems are connected they show up isolated here but they're actually connected in very interesting ways and we basically have nothing genetically to handle this idea this is a new set of things and it's only been recently that systems has been thought of as a unifying principle for many different kinds of things and so there are systems we live in there are the systems we are Seymour would ask what lands will we be building for the children of the future to grow up in and we should be asking ourselves what kind of culture of powerful ideas must be created because it's not creating the powerful ideas that's going to do it we didn't realize that strongly enough before it's actually creating a culture because it's the only way most people are ever going to learn thank you just focus on mathematics why do we think some people don't have a head for mathematics it's because they didn't learn mathematics in the mathematics classroom but when we go into the French classroom and see how our few children learn French we do not conclude that they do not have a head for French because we know that those very same children if they grew up in France would speak French perfectly so this is a total non sequitur that runs right through the whole thinking about our education people's abilities and who can learn what at one age at what age the problem for mathematics education is not to find a better way of teaching mathematics in the classroom the problem is to find the analog of learning French by growing up in France and that brings us to our next panel rethinking math I'm going to rethink I remember studying math 101 engineering school in a class of 300 shivering students buffalo at 8 o'clock in the morning and squinted a tiny overhead projector I didn't really want to go learn math at that point so you can imagine what I thought about math then but I certainly started learning it on my own since then today we're going to rethink math on a balmy Sunday afternoon so it'll be a nice atmosphere outside and with another panel and again like I said before I'm going to have the panelists introduce themselves starting on that end thank you very much, I have two minutes on me I'm sorry I'm losing my voice I won't speak much my name is Celia Hoyles I'm from London, England and I'm delighted to be here and thank Nicolaus for inviting me I'm going to give a quick two minutes on my life and these are related to when I met Seymour I first met him in 1972 met I think means that he somehow met but I saw him whether he saw me I very much doubt I was at a huge international congress of math education in Exeter in England and actually it was just awesome I was a class from math teacher I was doing all the things I now know I shouldn't have done but I was doing my best in the east end of London and there were these amazing speeches from actually I think Piaget didn't come but he was supposed to come and Freud and Tal and Polya, fantastic lectures all men by the way but I didn't notice that then I was bold over but as I was walking back to where I was saying there was this funny little notice on a tree now this is how I remember it whether it was true I remember it saying this way to the turtle pond somebody would tell me it wasn't that but I followed this path and there were these rather crazy people there was me, I'm an Essex girl I just didn't know much about anything I just knew my maths, I was quite good at that and there in the turtle pond was I think Seymour was Cynthia, was Marvin and they had those turtles that we see moving around all being navigated animation drawing and I just couldn't believe it all crazy, I didn't know what it was going on about but it was something that I never forget and then I just fast forward very quickly I met Seymour again in 1985 and I came to this wonderful place I gave one of the lectures at MIT logo conference because I had a big logo maths project by then but then in 1986 I invited Seymour to come to London to give a keynote at a big congress called psychology and maths education by then I was an important professor and not a teacher but I'm a teacher still at heart and Seymour spoke about beyond the cognitive the other face of mathematics and in fact Sherry Turtle earlier this morning has talked a little bit about those things about the emotional side how many people so often hate it but what I remember about that lecture was that he talked about the Euclidean propositions that we'd all learnt at school I was still teaching at school the circle theorems and he showed if you only thought yourself as a turtle they could all be thought of as one theorem now the interesting thing was that many of us there were completely bowled over by this this was a whole thing we'd never thought of before but equally true and Seymour predicted this too he predicted everything and there was also a lot of people in that audience, mathematicians maths educators who hated it and I just think there's always going to be resistance to new ideas and those were my two memorable experiences I hope I haven't gone too long Thank you Thank you My name is Richard Norse from University College London I think Seymour and I just about represent Europe and when we were preparing for this wonderful event I remember saying to Cedar you know the Americans are going to tease us terribly about Brexit it's interesting that nobody's mentioned it so we're around 1970 something I was studying pure mathematics and teaching social science students something about statistics and I was struck it never hit me before but I was struck not just by the fact that these students who were intelligent people studying intelligent subjects I was struck by how frightened they were it was a visceral fear of number and I couldn't understand it I went and tried to teach in a school and it was clear that I couldn't be a very good teacher because the kids were frightened of maths there they found it very difficult it seemed to me that there was a language issue that somehow the language I was speaking to the kids wasn't the language that they understood and then I left teaching to do a project with these strange little machines called computers was there any role for these machines in school in school mathematics and I came across a book and this isn't the Mindstorm story yet came across a book called Turtle Geometry how Abelson is here somewhere and he says Andy Decessary is not here oh hi how and I read this book and I thought this is a strange book it starts with a definition of a square and a triangle and it makes a house and then you get towards the end and there's a model of general relativity in the same book as drawing a square and a triangle and I didn't quite get it and then I read Mindstorms and then I understood the big idea and it's a big idea which I think over all those years since 1980 has been lost which is it isn't that we're not teaching mathematics terribly well it's that we're teaching the wrong mathematics and Alan alluded to that in the talk that he just gave and there are some wonderful examples and there are some people here who have done this work and there are some wonderful examples of mathematics instantiated in a programming way but it hasn't caught on that's the idea that hasn't caught on with all the millions of kids now doing net logo and scratch and programming many of their teachers are not completely sure why they're learning programming and one of the reasons that I think we I regard it as my duty and some other people here may agree with me that we have to keep alive is that programming is an alternative representational system for thinking about mathematics we had a project that I was co-director of a few years ago which had a tagline algebra is not a very good vehicle for learning algebra and programming is a much better vehicle and if I had another hour or two I would try and convince you of it that's an opportunity I just want to say one other thing which is in a way to be grateful to Seymour about 12 years ago I became director of something called the London Knowledge Lab which was about technology and learning in my university and I phoned up Seymour and I said could you come over he said well if I come over I'm going to just be able to come for the day and he came for the day and as he came in to the Knowledge Lab which had a big logo on the door he put on that face he identifies a point of infinity and focuses on it and you know something important is happening but you're not quite sure what and then he goes into the room of the Knowledge Lab and he looks at the audience and he says the K word is back and the fact that the K word had gone away for quite a long time I think is important and I think rediscovering what the K, why the K is in knowledge and why knowledge is in programming is still an open question and something that I guess we could talk about here thank you Thank you, Yura Hi, I'm Uri Walensky from Northwestern University and I guess I'll tell a little bit of my tale back in the 80s I was a mathematician who actually loved math saw beauty in it saw a lot of it as a fun activity and it came to my attention that a lot of other people didn't feel that way about it that in fact when I went to parties or events and I introduced myself as a mathematician I often got a rolling of eyes and something like I can't even balance my checkbook that was the notion of mathematics and it made me very sad that people came to know mathematics as this memorization of formulas and application of them when there were so many ideas that I found beautiful and helpful and useful in understanding the world well at that time I read Mindstorms and hopped across the river to meet with Seymour and we talked for hours and my life was changed dramatically changed and I started a conversation with him that continued for a very long time and in some ways continues to this day and you know I started to reconceptualize mathematics as a language for modeling the world for understanding the world something that humans make something that is just there that we're supposed to use and memorize and apply but something that we are engaged in in trying to make sense of the world and Seymour and I began a project around 2005 or so where we were going to write a series of papers on the power of making representations and how these representations computational representations can greatly change the way we think about mathematics as a modeling and that we can actually make a difference in the world that we can participate in the world by asking questions and be part of a culture that talks about these things so we were in a hotel in Hanoi writing about this we were also attending a mathematics conference and tragically as we were having this incredibly passionate conversation and crossing the street he got hit by a motor scooter and went into a coma for a very long time in Hanoi and in some ways that conversation stopped and I missed it terribly but now I had the privilege of mentoring many students and watching them go out into the world and continue these ideas and I know Seymour would be extremely happy to see how many people are carrying on those kinds of ideas and seeing mathematics and modeling and ideas as powerful and creating a culture of that which is very needed right now next up Pam I like your shoes Hal they're identical come on they're cheap they're thrifty thrifty my name is Hal my name is Hal Abelson I teach computer science here at MIT I'll follow a student saying how I got into this game I showed up at MIT in 1969 as a mathematics graduate student and that was the fall on one of the very most salutary things that's ever happened at MIT happened which is that the students rioted for the students for democratic society took over the president's office so I was sitting on the floor in the president's office and ran into a friend I knew and he said what are you doing and I said I'm a new graduate student is there anything interesting to do and he said well this artificial intelligence lab has a lot of interesting things to do you heard Sherry Turkle's beautiful beautiful talk at lunchtime about how it's really all about elevators and that was true for me also because I was standing in the artificial intelligence lab and the elevator door opened and there was Seymour who I sort of barely knew who he was and he said who are you I said I'm a new math graduate student I'd like to work at the AI lab and he said who would you like to work for and I said I'd like to work for you and that was 45 years ago and I'm still in this game that's great where would you like to be 45 years I mean a new one that came out was the wrong one I tell that story by the way to my students who are so concerned right now with planning out their lives because I think there's a real message there about the importance of randomness but we but we can talk about that mathematical concept absolutely mathematical randomness where we're speaking of I'm intrigued by talking about we're teaching math the wrong way I mean what's the what would be a better way or a better progression or how to best approach math of a rethinking math any of you want to jump in I'll say one thing I mean he mentioned randomness and you know we tend to the concept of randomness can be very very powerful for us we can use it to do things in the world whether it's to make some kind of colorful art piece or to get a robot to get unstuck by moving it in some random ways but we don't introduce it that way we introduce it as fractions and about ways of like counting very large numbers but if you use something like a random variable random in logo you can build with it you can construct with it and you understand it to usefulness and not just some decontextualized set of practices and formulas that you memorize could I just say a little thing I don't really think it's up for us to say how we should teach things I think because we have a whole lot of teachers who are doing wonderful jobs still it's very easy for us to say what should happen but and there's still some wonderful teachers who are still hearing about Simo's ideas either through his writing or through us or through his grad students and whatever and what they have to do is realize that there is an alternative way that their children, the students can rethink because when Simo was talking he was talking about one computer sometimes in a classroom now everybody has a device in their hands they can really harness this power and I could take you to schools in my country where they are doing wonderful things in terms of teaching mathematics I've actually got this little video that I'm obviously not going to show of a school in East London it's a very deprived area there are the kids doing wonderful things with our project which is using programming scratch scratch with maths and the head teacher is saying they're not just doing arithmetic which is what all they do all the time procedures and now they're reasoning through programming which is what we were all talking about so I still think it's still not happening and it's happening in our schools as we speak I just want to add one point and this is a point that I learned completely from Simo which is that the mathematics that we teach and undergraduates too is in a sense arbitrary it happens to be that mathematics that is approachable with a certain kind of technology that follows from a certain kind of culture and so on and it doesn't have any internal rationale except that it used to be that way so here's a very quick example everybody learns about constant velocity before they learn about acceleration why? because one is algebraically one is simpler than the other and that seems to be a sensible thing to do but in fact anybody who's ever been in a car knows something about acceleration everybody here knows why it feels as if you don't feel as if you're getting faster as you go around a corner but something is changing and that's the thing that we call acceleration why don't we teach acceleration before velocity of questions like that that there is very very little research being done on so we need more you talked about your love for math I had a 10th grade math teacher who every day came into the classroom and said I love math and you were going to love it before you leave my classroom too and we thought he was crazy but we did he was teaching geometry the beauty of geometry why not something we don't teach in science and math is we don't teach kids why it's important what it's used for we just teach the mechanics of it we don't teach you how to appreciate what it does it's almost like we expect to be mathematicians we teach music we don't expect you to be yo-yo ma or whatever but we teach you how to appreciate it and why it's important in our culture why don't we teach math the same way first and maybe kids will then say hey you know there's something here well we should there are many reasons for it some that are cultural and some that are historic but as Richard just said the actual set of practices that we actually teach is in a sense arbitrary and Seymour had a very wonderful metaphor that just speaks to a mathematician but maybe not to everybody that you could imagine a space of all the possible math educations where every point was a math education and he said we were such a narrow region of that space there's so much area to explore that could be useful to people and that a child could mathmatize something trying to understand what fishing holes to try or not to try or why their neighborhood might be segregated or integrated all those things can make sense of math as opposed to a set of and then you're motivated maybe to learn some procedures if you can understand that they're actually going to be important to you making a difference how was that what turtle geometry was sort of an attempt at so turtle geometry is a program that my colleague Andy De Cessa who's now at Berkeley and I carried out in trying to push through how much of mathematics could we actually cover through logo and as was said it kind of started with drawing a square and ended up with doing three-dimensional geometry and general relativity and it sort of was that logo reformulating math program so having said that let me criticize that and let me respond to what was said about the content doesn't matter and what you said about your 10th grade teacher because it's not about the mathematics it's about the intellectual empowerment as I said I started logo in 1969 it's hard to appreciate how radical it was in 1969 to say that computers should be used by kids and it's hard to appreciate the sense of almost mischief and empowerment that we were doing in the AI lab by saying these giant department of defense funded computers some of the most powerful computers in the world what we do with them is we have the 11 year olds in Lexington using them and there was this wonderful sense of empowerment and mischief one thing we said to ourselves in the early 70s is that gosh if a computer could only cost a thousand dollars then all of the education would be transformed so of course it didn't work out like that it turned out to be more complicated but that vision of transformation was something that we articulated through mathematics not sure why, maybe because Seymour was a mathematician many of us in the program were mathematicians and we saw this sort of love in ourselves for this insane thing and the idea that you could make an environment where kids and other people could start to experience that kind of love was enormously compelling for us so it was more than just mathematics it was the notion that you were looking at a source of intellectual empowerment for kids in teaching children thinking which Seymour wrote in 1971 the first articulation of Logan he talked about kids coming to see themselves as empowered and as empowered intellectual agents did they actually feel empowered? well you have to really ask because the question is did the kids feel empowered and some of them said wonderful wonderful things or was it really us saying gosh Alan told me to say something about differential geometry that they were using this thing and we say oh gosh they are experiencing something about differential geometry it might have been us enthusiastic naive in education researchers and naive graduate students imposing that on there but they are sort of two different two very very related ideas there is this notion of reformulating math which is the kind of thing that logo did the kind of thing that Andy and I did in turtle geometry and then there is this notion of intellectual empowerment and as Alan mentioned one of Seymour's guiding metaphors was this notion of math land and one of the opportunities that we saw ourselves having is how do you construct that kind of math land where kids can kind of visit there you go visit math land and you learn you just imbibe these ideas the thing I wanted to say today that's different is that was 45 years ago and that's changed and what we did not appreciate in the logo days was the sense in which that computer formal mathematics world formal computing world was going to become the real world and I want to say something about looking ahead from where we are because in logo days you talk about going to the computer to do something we don't go to the computer anymore the computer is with us my super computer is right here and we don't understand the extent to which the analogy of that math land that math culture that computing culture is already with us as Alan talked about a culture we may not like what's happening there but it is one of the things we need to appreciate is in that culture kids can be empowered they can do things that are not only expression of intellectual ideas but they can do things that actually change the world around them there's an example that came out yesterday of three eighth graders in Wisconsin who wrote an app for their school which counteracts bullying because if you're bullied you send a message to a teacher and it records this and helps you do it there's the 13 year olds in Daravi which is in India which is one of the largest slums in Asia where there are 13 year olds who are writing an app in their community so the families can schedule time at the communal water distribution plant there are kids in Winchester who are writing an app and their quiz and advises you about in high school about whether you're too drunk to drive so the point is what we started in logo as thinking about this abstract world where you could be intellectually empowered we have to realize that now kids can be not only intellectually empowered but actually empowered in their world and that's where I think we need to go with this to understand and really celebrate our logo and now say that math land we don't have to build it we're there is there a natural extension of logo now something like it well not to advertise I'm making something like logo or he's making something that's in exactly the same spirit in my view what we would have made of logo if there were iPhones in 1970 but it's that sense of you can actually make something that people can use so you know network everybody's network together right I mean we keep forgetting how powerful this gadget is this is more powerful than anything anybody had except I think maybe NASA for the entire moon mission had something which was equivalent to the power in this or maybe that was only last year's thing in the real world one of the leveling things about current computer and information technology is that the powerful tools are there to the extent that even the middle school students can do things that are significant in their world and that I think is the place we're going to go yeah I want to make a kind of dissension to that kind of dissension of dissent it's obviously true that Hal has a supercomputer in his pocket absolutely true that potentially the computing power that everybody has is quite unlimited and so on but that doesn't change the world because the culture that goes with most of that technology is to close it down and keep it secret and make money out of it it's not to make it so that people can see how it works and become intellectually empowered that's not to say that the world shouldn't be but that's the way it is so we have a big job to do to try and as it were democratize oh I think that's true I like to talk about people talk about computational thinking I like to say there's computational thinking there are computational values what is it about the world where these computational ideas can have power like having a lot of free software like having openness to databases so people can do it those are computational values and then I like to talk about computational actions which is what I was just saying that even middle school students can do things that are significant because of the richness of this equivalent math world that we are already in that doesn't say there are no problems there certainly are I couldn't possibly agree with you more but it's an enormous opportunity to play the game in the real world and see kids playing the game in the real world I want to add one thing I mean we all of us have an image of math from math class which are about shuffling certain symbols around or drawing various figures of various sorts but as we were talking about in the conversation here Seymour was working with us to expand the notion of what that is and that computation plays an essential role as a new representational system and the idea is that there are things that are hard for us as Alan mentioned our brain isn't always good at certain things but we build tools to do them if we have a tree that we can't chop down we build an axe but there are intellectual tools that we build and that we are in control of that help us understand the world better and there is so much complexity that we have to deal with in the world now and wouldn't it be great if we had a culture where we could reason together and talk together about these things with this kind of structure I'd settle for a culture just talk civilly and teaching civics now at that point which we don't do anymore can I make just one quick one really is it's only following up what we said if I had to say one thing to rethink maths is for all the people all the mathematicians I don't know what we mean by a mathematician there are mathematicians working in all sorts of fields and somehow a mathematician is always stereotyped as a professor of maths and it's usually a man we have to break out of that stereotype and all the people who are working in maths across all sorts of industry and commerce they have to declare themselves and then we will see that mathematics is a much richer subject okay thank you go see hidden figures you'll like hidden figures on that but thank you all panel very much for taking time to be with us today next up where's Suzanne excuse me I saw you look at your watch while I was talking I was talking about methylene go sit there absolutely now who's going to introduce me you are just on my phone because this is will be my last interview of the day because I have to go back and do a radio show but I'm very happy to spend it with you how kind thank you and of course you know Suzanne Matthew Pepper yes you can say hi Mary to see more for 24 years 29 I could get my facts checking my facts and you have an incredible background as interpreter of Russian culture recognized by the U.S. and Russia as a builder of bridges between the two countries and I don't know if the audience knows about the phrase you came up with Ronald Reagan, talk a little bit about that well I did I did teach him the phrase trust but verify which has now become an American phrase which is very nice but it just happened at lunchtime before Reykjavik I said well Mr. President you know the Russians often like to express themselves in proverbs and there's one that might come in handy in your talks and I said it's trust but verify well he leapt on it as did Mrs. Reagan and they both loved it and then I said you're an actor you'll be able to learn to pronounce it in two minutes and I taught him and then I sent it to him on a card with the right accents anyway it's wonderful now it's become an American like on an American lexicon and the Russians have always been very mused that it's actually a Russian proverb that's a great story how would you describe your marriage with Seymour do you have a way of summing it up well I realize that I'm sort of the Seymour at home person after hearing everything today one can only be very humble about that but I can tell you some stories about Seymour as a husband and first of all I want to say that I think we were the odd couple I mean nobody we were so different in so many ways first of all I hated mathematics and I knew nothing about mathematics and I failed it whenever I took it so I'm the best example of how badly it was taught I think but anyway I didn't like mathematics and I know I did sense that some of his colleagues really wondered how he could be slumming by marrying somebody who was a historian so we were we were really the odd couple and I know that when we first were keeping company I kept saying to him you're not my type and he looked at me because I thought MIT and he would look at me and say well maybe it's time for you to try a new type well I did and we had 29 wonderful precious years and I never ceased to admire ever his great mind his humility and that's the mark of all great men and it's very rare his sense of humour his love of life his endless curiosity his lifelong thirst for learning about everything and anything I mean he had it seemed to me the fresh love of discovery and the innocent eagerness for learning of a super brilliant child or the genius that he was and all his life for instance he was an inveterate buyer and collector of books now it was books of all kinds from any kind you might think I've heard a book on it how to play baseball how to speak Japanese how to do Chinese cooking about history, about biographies about philosophy he had maps he had jokes from all over the world and what he did when we moved to Maine these went all to the most complicated mathematical books and statistics books and books that I couldn't even read at all well indeed when we moved to Maine 12,000 pounds of our move with books gives you an idea and he was constantly, constantly investigating and once he just decided he told me that he was flower challenged well he decided he was going to learn about that that he didn't know the difference between a tulip and a peony so he started because he noticed that in Maine there was this flower that grew a lot it was called a lupin a wolf's tail and of course he discovered very quickly that it had been called a wolf's tail because people thought that it ate the soil because you know it grew along the street around it was dry, wrong absolutely wrong it was because it actually fed the soil lupins disappear after a while after they fed the soil well that started it so he got into this more and more and more and to my alarm I mean we'd be driving along a road and he would suddenly stop in the middle of the road just stop, jump out and run over to the side of the road to find a new specimen that he saw well he finally in his whole search he had a different specimens in our own field and he learned all the Latin definitions of them and on top of it ever after that he would choose and compose the most beautiful florist bouquets for our anniversaries and our birthdays knowing all the flowers himself well he also, there were many things I mean he was such an inveterate learner and also of course he adored children and when we went to have cocktails sometimes in Maine with friends, he didn't really like that so much all the children would always come and take him by the hand and take him away and he'd disappear and you'd find him on the floor usually with him if you did but the thing that was amazing they all called him Seymour and the parents, one parent said it was very shocked, they thought it was great to call such a famous professor Seymour until they found out that the children saw it that every household, it was a title like grandfather and every household had a Seymour I buy it I thought it was pretty good too who took out the garbage he did that too he also never tied his shoes ever and I would always say to him tie your shoes because you're going to fold down and break that beautiful nose no, he never did and we had a bookkeeper and her size was I think about 10 at the time and she'd say, tie your shoes and he'd say, huh, Seymour is a genius and he doesn't tie his shoes did he ever get in trouble for that? no, no and he never tripped, that's the amazing thing he never tripped but you know when Bakwak came to take they were taking for the computer museum Bakwak, I saw him he was just clearing his throat a little bit all the time and finally I said, you know he finally looked up at Seymour and said, would you mind tying your shoes and he finally did but I could never change that habit of him, never, never he also, more things, because living with him was never dull he wanted to learn to dance now I love ballet and I danced and I myself studied ballet for a long time and I adore ballet and so we went to a lot of ballet and I loved music and as Todd told you Seymour really started to learn music, I bought him books about music and mathematics and all sorts of things and he did want to learn to dance the trouble is dancing is about feeling, about feeling he was counting, counting, counting so it was really hard you can't do a wall if you're counting all the time and then the other thing was he wanted to sing he so much wanted to sing so he joined a local choir a small choir well of course the sweet man he was tone deaf absolutely tone deaf doesn't go well with a choir not really, but he tried he tried so hard and he kept doggedly trying and finally the choir decided that he was so plucky and so cheery that the named him actually Darren Mascot Darren Mascot and when we were in Russia we spent three and a half months in Russia doing lots of wonderful things but anyway his teacher there explained to him that singing was a great way to learn Russian and so I would hear him all the time singing Russian off-key of course but always so happy happy we had so many adventures together I must say we went to so many countries and we enjoyed so much all the time I don't mean to rub I'm running short but did you ever notice where Seymour did his best thinking oh yes I think he did his best thinking in the office he had in the learning barn he would stay there sometimes he would work all night I mean really all night but it wasn't in the shower or while driving in his office see he had this intense power of concentration when he went into his concentration nothing he heard nothing and you didn't know I mean he was lost in that concentration you could see the smoke coming out of his ear not quite Seymour I loved he was so funny that was one of the great things he had just such a great sense of humor and always knew how to make a joke on one word well we don't have time for me to tell you all those stories so I won't tell them but well read it in your book maybe but anyway he was also enormously generous that's another thing I admired about him he always thought about money ever ever never which not so good absolutely never he had only one really persistent thought in mind he always thought about those two billion children in the world that had no education that was his ambition his hope his lifetime hope he invited all kinds of things you know a computer that worked like a sewing machine computer feed I mean all kinds of things and he was always thinking I mean about that but when he went into his thinking mode nothing that was fine I didn't mind but anyway his generosity is he used to work so hard on recommendations for people and one professor always said why do you do that Seymour I've got paragraphs you know that I do work three days four days and I'm told that there was never anybody who has turned down after a letter Seymour you worked on writing it so personally it was wonderful anyway it really was in a way that his generosity that brought him down in the end at the time he was working on one thing he said we are foolish to try to make children love math what we have to do is give them mathematics they can love that's what he was working on and he was halfway through a book about education in the 21st century when he went away to give a keynote address and he was hit by a motorcycle crossing the street but you know he had just called me before and those were his last words he said I'm afraid to cross the street and I honestly have often well felt very guilty about that I had only been there I would have ordered him a taxi and that unfortunately I wasn't there but in any case he narrowly escaped that's really narrowly I mean he was so brave always always and then when he returned to America he was in a coma and this I wanted to tell you all about because most of you don't really know much about what happened in those nine and a half years afterwards he came back from America to America in a special Swiss plane that saved him John Kerry sent the National Guard to pick him up he was in coma for quite a long time when he took him up to Maine he could only babble nobody knew what his life was going to be all I can tell you is that if he did miracles about learning before that I told you and this was the triumph of his life he was extraordinary he never stopped learning not one second all the time so he had to re-teach himself he had to re-teach everything and you know at first nobody knew whether he would ever speak again or anything nobody had any idea the Mayo Clinic said that you know most people don't use their brains but he had such a disciplined one and that regular rehab wouldn't help him and nobody knew what to do doctors didn't know what to do and so he but he, I've never met I've never seen a more courageous person in my life he never complained he could have complained of course but he never complained he just set about to be learning everything an Italian movie maker who came to see him there was a short period out of the coma until he got sepsis where he was sometimes talking quite well and she interviewed him and she said isn't it very difficult to have to re-learn everything and he said oh no it's very exciting well he did he learned how to walk he learned how to chew he could speak now he never ever regained his beautiful speaking he could never have done those lectures anymore that way but he relearned and you know sometimes I had the feeling he was looking at himself relearning at the end and he was working every day he relearned he learned how to read he read all the newspapers everything and he read anything he wanted to read but he could not explain himself he never did get back to the computer and it didn't frustrate him no what was really marvelous I bought him a lot of these lectures by prominent professors so he had a working schedule every day 9.30 to about 2.30 and he would want these professors sometimes you'd hear him laughing and he'd say you'd hear him say laugh laugh laugh and you'd hear he'd laugh and but or otherwise sometimes you watched him with that concentration his earphones on looking at that Skyping was absolutely a miracle he Skyped with some of his colleagues David Cavallo showed him his class he Skyped and saw the classes in Brazil, in Sweden in other countries he Skyped with many people his wonderful form but I have to mention Rick Goldblatt from the lab the artificial intelligence lab who suddenly appeared and for years Skyped with him at least twice a week taught him went through many many exercises changing them brain exercises all the time so faithfully and so generously George Markowski came you see unfortunately Cambridge was quite far away and there weren't very many people that came up from there but Maine people were wonderful he did extraordinary work in Maine and George Markowski who is here today came every single month to have lunch with him and to talk to him and to work with him and others very wonderful people Damian Bebell and others from Maine would come to see him and of course he loved at the end I mean I tell you all of the life he loved parties he liked birthday parties, he loved them he had a wonderful time in them he loved balloons, funny toys adored funny toys, great tops and all sorts of things and of course he loved visitors, especially ladies now he always had had quite a weak spot for the fair sex and in fact he always said that the thinking of women was much more interesting than the thinking of men and so so when they came and I don't care what age, little, big, old and he wide smiles and he'd always say how wonderful to see you and then he'd say when do I see you again and I always thought it was very good for his health so I tried to get as many ladies to come as he could and they did I have a word for that but I'm not going to use it yes I know that's alright anyway I will just end by saying first of all, those were precious years we were very, very happy we really had wonderful life together and I had long, long, long, I never had such long conversations with anybody we talked about the Bible we talked about religion we talked about everything and he often recited he loved Shakespeare's son poetry was his great love and he would recite them to me before we went to sleep my heart and that's amazing now very few people in the world can say that they have changed the world that we live in but he did it and he did it and he was so humble about it and his visionary predictions which sometimes we laugh at about cell phones or anything robots that would do work and everything and the omnipresence of the computer for which I don't always bless him I have to tell you and anyway and much more that he predicted have come true and it's going to affect the future that we live in and I know if he hadn't been stopped a little bit short what he could have done there would have been more but I have to say that for me losing him was well like extinguishing the bright light that illuminated my life and also I know illuminated the life of millions of learners all over the world Suzanne, Matthew, thank you very much thank you thank you great words see you all on Friday okay, are we on? hello, I'm Ira Flato I have a radio program that I've been doing Ira had to catch the train back so you get the dregs of me introducing Danny and then the panel will introduce self and I won't give people time to get in the room so we get on to schedule my introduction of Danny is really metaphorically an introduction of Joey and I think I saw Joey in the room, are you here Joey? yes, you are here well in the early days before the media lab existed I went to Japan all the time and because of Jerry Wiesner all of these media tycoons chairman of Sony the chairman of would bring this kid around to show how cool they were and it was Joey I met Joey it seems like half a dozen but it was maybe only three times with these very important people and he was their connection now why am I telling you that Marvin and Seymour had a Joey who was Danny I think Danny when I knew you you were 16 something like that 15 maybe so I'm going to introduce you as Marvin and Seymour's Joey honored by that introduction let's start by doing an experiment so first of all you have to each choose a lab partner that's the fun part if one of you gets left out because the people next to you choose a different lab partner then we can do it with three but it's better with two so pick somebody to be your lab partner and then get your program out if you can't find a program Alan's reality kit will work better to have a program so here's the experiment we're going to do and you're going to take turns doing it basically it's going to be an experiment of putting your hands around the program dropping it and catching it but your partner is going to do the dropping or you're going to do the catching so and then I want you to switch and I want you to do it a few different times so just try it now be sure everybody gets both a chance to drop and catch ok so this is a true experiment I actually don't know how it's going to come out ok that's probably enough to start with we'll do some more experiments later so just out of curiosity how many of you got better at it as you did more of it that you caught it more often ok so many of you did if you think of that that almost doesn't make sense because it ought to be just a matter of reaction time or something like that you probably got better at seeing a cue when it was going to be dropped or maybe lowering your hand as you grabbed it or something like that and you probably cheated to get better somehow and you probably didn't consciously cheat and you probably didn't even think about how you got better you just got better and the amazing thing about the human mind is that pretty much anything that we do over and over again we get better at we learn, there's a learning curve and it doesn't matter if something is obscure is speaking in iambic pentameter or a very difficult task that most of us learn to do which is learning to recognize little scribble signs on a piece of paper and translating those into words there are things that obviously we don't have built in hardware to do no advantage to a chimpanzee to be able to speak in iambic pentameter or a caveman or what the things we're evolved from there's probably no advantage to be able to ride or ride a bicycle or launch a rocket ship or any of those things from a luxury standpoint but what was an advantage is we clearly developed this very general purpose thinking machine that got good at whether we think about it or not we get better doing things over and over again we're a universal learner for some amazing reason which I don't think any of us understand and I want to talk about one aspect of Seymour because to me it was kind of a unique aspect about it and I've never seen anybody else like this but Seymour was constantly experimenting on himself to do things to see what that process was what was it exactly he was learning when he learned to be a juggler he didn't just say I'm getting better and better at juggling he was like why did I just suddenly get better why did I just suddenly get worse he tried to deconstruct that process and he tried to you saw interviews of him asking kids or you've heard about him asking kids what were you thinking, how did that feel and he was constantly learning new things so you've heard stories about all the books Seymour read and things like that I was lucky enough a couple of times to move into houses that Seymour had abandoned and he generally abandoned them with whatever he had been learning it would be the books on Chinese flower arrangement or Japanese flower arrangement some obscure form of cooking or how helicopters worked and there'd be the unicycle he was obviously trying to learn to play that in the kazoo and you'd see all this and then there would be the book on learning to write a unicycle and so I would get to just try some of the things he was learning and realize that he was just constantly in that mode and in fact I was lucky enough to first start working with him in very much the way that he worked with a six year old of I really knew nothing about the project I was working on for him and we were doing something new so it was like figuring it out and looking at thinking so I from the beginning had the relationship with him that he had with a six year old not the relationship that he had with another researcher and interestingly enough because of that he would treat a six year old as a peer because the six year old was doing the thing that he was doing which is learning about the world trying to construct the world trying to understand and figure things out whereas generally his peers on paper were people who had already figured out the world and were trying to convince everybody else what they had figured out and so he tended to treat them as people who needed to be talked out of their delusions whereas the six year olds he tended to treat as peers there were exceptions Marvin Minsky he treated as a peer but Marvin has a lot in common with a six year old that was a and so that was a wonderful thing about him and so I think that that notion of seeing yourself as an experimental apparatus was something he often took to an extreme and he did things like wear the prism glasses that caused you to reverse everything for a week and then when you take them off everything is reversed again he was always learning to samba dance or trying to learn to sing and things like that and he wasn't necessarily good at it but he actually loved to see the process of learning and what it was like to be bad at something which is why he connected with the six year old so well and why he connected with me so well because we were working together on things that I didn't understand at all am I working together? it's like he worked together with the six year olds so that was always the wonderful thing and it was always a mystery of him sort of deconstructing and thinking about his own thinking with that great experimental laboratory he had in his head so I think that is one of the things that I'd like to for me it was a great gift to recognize that if you're interested in thinking you have the most amazing laboratory that you carry around with you all the time and it's really useful by the way in lectures when you get bored you can play with this laboratory if you're not interested in what's being said so what I'm going to do is start just as a simple example and show you a kind of playing and I'll show you a specific thing that I did some of this with Seymour and I think it'll give you an example of some of these abstractions people have been talking about about for instance body intelligence and things like that and this is the kind of thing Seymour actually did and so I'll start you on it but it's something you can keep on doing anytime you get interested or bored or in something else so it's kind of so it's going to be about counting, counting things in your head so first of all everybody in their mind count the numbers allowed don't actually say them but think one, two, three everybody understand what I mean by counting in your head okay did anybody get up over 50 good you're doing it right okay so the question is I'm going to, okay does everybody know twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you are above all the world so bright like a diamond in the night something like that however you know it it doesn't matter so here's what I'd like you to do I'm going to do things now I'm also I'm going to be saying a bunch of things and I will occasionally say the word Seymour okay when I clap my hands and I want you to count the number of times that I say the word Seymour but simultaneously with that what I want you to do is I want you to count the number of syllables in that poem so for instance twinkle that's two little that's two plus two is four so go through like that while you're setting the poem in your mind but also keep track of the number of times that I say Seymour and then we'll end when I clap my hands the second time everybody get the exercise you're counting two things at once the number of syllables in the poem and the number of times that I say Seymour five seven six Seymour three Seymour 14 Seymour Seymour eight twenty Seymour five okay does everybody have two numbers in their head the number of times that no didn't think so it's kind of impossible to do right Eric okay let's try something else let's think of could we learn to do this could we learn to do this a completely different way so let's do one count let's think of different ways of counting other than saying the numbers in our head okay here's how I want you we'll pick a different point Mary had a little lamb everybody know it everybody all the way to and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go okay okay so same thing again but this is the way you're going to count the syllables so let's do it with twinkle use your fingers okay put your fingers on your legs okay and you first when you say twinkle twinkle little star how like that and then what? because you've already done that one oh let's do Mary had a little lamb I'm sorry you're right I didn't want to give that as an example so you would have a head start on it but you will do that with Mary had a little lamb okay and then when you get to the end of ten move your hands down a little bit and do it again and then turn and do it again okay and the way that I want you to count the sea moors is you see these squares behind me in your mind the first time I say it look at the first square the second time I say it look at the second square don't count it as the second square just look at that square when it's all over you can count how many squares you went over and when it's all over you can look at what finger you were on okay does that make sense? it's complicated but you're doing two different ways of counting one you're going to kind of use your fingers and then you're going to kind of use your eyes to put things places and you're never going to say a number to yourself afterwards you're going to look at your fingers and you're going to look at how many squares okay we'll try it I don't know if it's going to work but we'll try and it's Mary had a ready four five six Seymour seven eight four Seymour seven four eight Seymour four three two one five three one two I'll stop there in your mind look at your fingers where they are how many times you went through them and how many of you have some idea of how many syllables or Mary have a little lamb most of you just have curiosity how many got 26 I got many people I don't know that's right that's just what I got I was doing it too okay what about the number of times I said Seymour how many people got how many times I said Seymour so okay so so the interesting thing is that was a sort of a trick of trying to use different parts of your brain to offload the counting function rather than your normal verbal counting because your verbal thing was being used to recite Mary had a little lamb so this is an interesting experiment you can keep on going with you can keep on finding tricky ways of counting multiple things at once and this is actually something I do do when I'm bored in a lecture is I try to find multiple things to count and see how many streams of counting I can manage to keep up myself I can visual part of my brain or the musical part of my brain or the motor part of my brain and it's a game but that's exactly the kind of game that would engage Seymour that's the kind of conversation that he would love because as soon as you had a conversation with that you were a research collaborator with him and that's exactly the kind of collaborator he was with the six year olds that you saw in the picture he was getting to think about themselves how thinking worked and really exploring that amazing capacity we have for constructing in our brain some reality of the world by this mechanism that's so fabulously general and magical so that's a very simple kind of example now he had much more sophisticated things than this was just I picked something I could go through in a couple of minutes but always had the interaction that when you finished talking with Seymour you always felt smarter and it wasn't necessarily that he taught you something but what he did is he taught you that you had some capacity to explore things that you maybe didn't notice that you had and he led you in interaction and maybe this is an interesting thing to explore and things like that and that ability to make us all feel smarter made us the people around him love him even when he experimented on us in a place that sometimes were difficult because this experiment he did in his whole life he did in his social interactions with people he did in decided what would it be like if I violated this societal convention what would happen if I didn't tie my shoes what would he was constantly doing that and sometimes some of those experiments worked out and some of them didn't sometimes they made it difficult for the people around him and they didn't but people put up with those difficulties because he made them so much smarter and he made all of us smarter so I'm really grateful to have had the chance to have been around him and I'm grateful to have had a chance to talk today thank you very much logo classes at the our part of a Senegalese government project but does it make sense for an African country to experiment with giving children computers I believe that computers can succeed here where all other media have failed miserably they offer a way out of the vicious circle of scientific weakness in a culture breeding scientific weakness generation I've watched these children become involved with computers with the same ease and the same difficulties as in London or New York or Paris we're rethinking the world so we have an enormous topic and we have 30 minutes so with the permission of the panel I'm going to be very clear about guiding you when you reach the original three minutes that we suggested and then we'll have a bit more of an open conversation my name is Bob Massey I'm the Executive Director of the Sustainable Solutions Lab at UMass Boston but in the context of this gathering I was had the privilege of seeing more steps on for almost 30 years and had the opportunity to get to know him through that relationship today we have an extraordinary panel and from including Clotilde Fonseca from Costa Rica and Fatimata Silla from Senegal David Cavallo who's doing work in Brazil and Jacqueline Azlanian who is now in Armenia and we are going to explore the question about Seymour's impact on the world and we had a conversation beforehand about what focusing question we might use so the focusing question that I think we came up with is how did Seymour help you rethink the world and allow you to talk a bit about your project but you're going to have to fit your self introduction and all the other into the three minutes and then we will come back through so would you like to start well first of all let me say that I am celebrating tremendously this memorial because to borrow Dylan Thomas' words I did not want to see Seymour go gentle into that good night I really believe that his ideas I don't know if they should rage but certainly they should burn and enlighten the development of educational transformation in many places in the world would you just tell them your name my name is Clotilde Fonseca and I met Seymour in 1987 and we worked from there in the development of a project that brought not only computers but a new educational culture to Costa Rican schools with a priority in the inner city and rural schools this was a project that arose as a result of a campaign promise of President Oscar Arias and there was an international bid and I came to the media lab to see what you were doing here with Seymour and his team and then we went to other places to see other projects the media lab which was the company that was doing the work, the consultancy work with Seymour won the bid and this became a major educational transformation for the country the first thing that I would like to say is that Seymour used to say that there is no change without risk and if there is something that came into this project was the capacity of Seymour to risk working with us and our capacity to risk working with him it was at a time when resistance to logo and to the constructionist philosophy was at its high the idea, the prevailing idea was that you needed 15 MIT media lab PhDs to bring computers to children particularly in the developing world and as this project developed I learned to work with Seymour and to work with the community that Seymour was a part of and that he had created so I cannot think about Seymour without thinking about Nicholas Mitch and Brian and Edith and Jacqueline and David and so many other people who were part of this team that had a vision that had clear ideas about what had to be done and that trusted us to work with them to bring this into reality in a poor developing agricultural country in Central America That's three minutes Okay I started working with Seymour and Nicholas in France in 1982 then at the media lab and at the media lab I had also the incredible privilege of working with Todd Mcover and Marcel and Gloriana Davenport and Edith Ackerman really I can go on with these incredibly exceptional people and also in the field very much with Fatou and David and a lot of you here in the audience In 2009 I was offered the possibility of starting a new kind of learning foundation in Armenia the President and Prime Minister at the time trusted me to design and launch this foundation and the idea was to create a new generation of critical thinkers that were going to see change in the country So I've been working at this foundation for now seven years and there are 500 scholars who studied in the most amazing learning environments and centers of excellence around the world most of all they learn to be aware of each other's skills and potential and to think how they're going to make their talent to change the country What I focused on is the process of creating networks of network and also nurturing a particular part of the work which is how you transition from academic accomplishments to real life achievements and how you build communities of learners so that they can transform themselves and the collective in the process of transforming communities and the country What I have learned from Simo is over 27 years of seeing him put learning learning in practice and what we have to be aware of is learning doesn't happen as an isolated process so we are the gift that I think he gave all of us and it's actually each of us to one another and I feel very much connected to all of you and I think that the world in a way it's also in this audience so one more point if I may is the most powerful thing that I saw him teach us how to trust yourself and to trust your peers so that you can shed the fear and embrace the most amazing challenges get out of your comfort zone and take on challenges whether they are very small or very large and that's how you change the world Thank you Thank you I would like to say hello to everybody and thank everybody and I feel very blessed to be here today as an African woman who had the privilege of working with Simo and this was since 1981 with the event of Saint-Moniel the L'informatique my name is Fatimata Seisila and Simo was connected to Dr. Jacques Duf he was the minister of scientific and technical research in Senegal and they decided to set up a computer lab computers use of computers in education to improve learning and teaching for a different way of learning in a different way of teaching as we all know that Simo's paradigm was very different from what was happening at that time and I was selected to lead the research lab within the Econormal Superior of Dakar and we flew from Dakar with all the university teachers to New York and to work with Simo within the computer lab LCSI New York and after that we went back and we visited Saint-Moniel having the visit of Nicholas Negroponte Simo Pappert Bob Mall was there too and we did extraordinary research teachers, primary school students within this lab changing the whole learning paradigm teaching paradigm where teachers and students would work together with exchange all those things Mitch talked about this morning about passion about fears and mostly about sharing and after two years of running this project well I wanted to go back and do my master's degree and I was thinking about going back to France to do that and when Nicholas and Simo heard about that they said what you want to do your computer science degree you have to go to the best school in the world why don't you try to go to MIT I said well, I don't know and thanks to Nicholas, thanks to Simo thanks to Bob Mall and thanks to all of my friends here because we call today sisters and brothers this is a true family and well I passed the test of being admitted to MIT and it was a wonderful experience I was a research assistant for Simo and worked with students from Harvard and we worked in translating logo in Swahili in Urdu and we were also experimenting logo in local languages and today I am a regional education advisor to provide a technical advice to project education project in Africa in West and Central Africa using Simo's paradigm I will elaborate more later I have so much to say so much to say I am David Cavallo I am currently a visiting professor at a new public university University of Brazil which as its basic plan purely active project based learning interdisciplinary every student gets a laptop everybody learns programming we have robotics we would have had our fab set up if our budget hadn't been cut but we hope it will be restored this week but you notice that the ideas of learning and the role of technology and the idea of bringing these things to areas and regions and populations that never had access before is coming to fruition and so it's really fantastic to participate in but then also you see how ideas flow and not necessarily through institutions but certainly through people if they've had a strong enough experience and so the launching question of how is Simo influence my thinking I think the only way I can answer that as really influenced by Simo is that such a question is unanswerable correctly or fully or honestly because for Simo had such an integrity of ideas that they always had to keep their power and they had to go in their full depth and the problem with education is often we just tell you about a powerful idea and you never get to learn it and so these kind of things and creating the environments and conditions and the tools to work with such that you can explore and go deeply into these ideas Edith Ackerman who we all dearly miss used to always say that Simo would never mix the water with the wine and that was always about the ideas it's just such a mathematician or whatever that it had to be correct and whether it was for career or for this or for that didn't matter the idea had to stay pure and this is I think this push for knowing deeply and having the time to do so and Simo would always say don't save time lose it and so these kind of things to not have the three minute experiences or the hour of code or anything like that and create the environment where everybody can learn that's I'd like to pick up on that you know when we had this is for everyone when we had our conversation before on the phone there was some discussion about whether it was Simo's ideas independently or Simo's ideas coupled with a certain kind of personality and when we talked briefly about his personality people came up with certain qualities that he was radically inclusive was one term that people came up with and that he we heard earlier today that he was deeply committed to the intellectual empowerment of other people no matter where they were or what conditions they were under so I'm wondering if you would like to speak to that just going in a little more deeply into your experience what was it about Simo combination of ideas and personality and his generosity which you've also heard a lot which really made the kind of experimentation and risk that you were talking about possible well I think that one of the characteristics about Simo was that even though he was a fantastic thinker and intellectual he defined himself as an activist and he really wanted to leave an imprint in the world and in children's lives in the case of the Costa Rica project it was a project of great magnitude we have in a country with a population of around 4 million people over 2 million children and youth have gone to the program which has existed for 30 years we have survived 7 government changes and we have been able to institutionalize a program that is today not only extremely successful but that it has been able to influence national policy since the ideas about a new culture of learning the ideas about project based learning the ideas about computational thinking have gone into national policy not only into the experience of the teachers this is a project that is centered in the student but also in teacher development at the time when it began nobody wanted to get teachers involved with computers they thought they didn't have the capacity and they wanted to bypass the experience of working with the teachers I remember the minister of finance from a American country who told me I love your project this is a fantastic project because you just install computers get the teachers out of the way and then reduce the number of well gas of strikes and you have just the best situation ever because you can actually get the education without the teachers and this is the dream of a financial minister but certainly not the dream of someone interested in education and Seymour was very sensitive to the way that we designed the projects and very particularly to the way in which we did student development teacher development and in which our program had an impact not only in the educational system but very specifically in the country's economy over one or two decades Costa Rica went from being a basically agricultural country exporting coffee and bananas to being a technology exporter one of the first exporters in the world if you calculate that according to the country's population and GDP so the impact that this program and the work with Seymour and the media lab had really changed our economy and we have research today that proves the impact in cognitive and learning outcomes of the students that we can now with great joy share thank you so much. Other comments about this? Thank you Yes, I will just talk about my own case Yeah, please because I was in this media lab I was one of the first graduates from this media lab and working with Seymour I introduced logo into my home with my own children and from the age of six they started programming in logo and this boosted the way of doing research way of learning, way of engaging themselves into learning and today to my two children they are all doctors today one is a PhD in electrical engineering and the other is a medical doctor and they still remember how logo helped them move forward and because I wanted this experience to I wanted to offer to share this experience with other children in Senegal we've created an association that became an NGO today just to have a creative environment with computers and the like so that Senegalese children Senegalese women because for me it's very important to have an educated woman, an educated mother if you want the community to move forward with children's education and that was so important for me so such a powerful idea I lived with and when I see what I got from my children I just want all every woman to be highly educated to understand the power of thinking the power of sharing and the power of doing things with passion so this changed a lot so incredibly we only have 10 minutes left so do you have anything you'd like to add or can I move on to it yes Stephanie I would like to echo what Clotilde said thinking also has to go through the action and I think the lesson that we all learned from Simo is that if you want to really make a difference in your own growth and the community that you are working with you really have to embed it in a project that can be pregnant of very many important aspects that really includes everybody and gives everyone a chance to express their ideas and see them happen and so that sometimes when you work at level of a country and you want to see the change the task can be daunting but when we worked with Simo his idea was that if we understood how to translate our important messages in projects that can be an image to the world of what is possible showing what is possible is the way of engaging larger communities and actually showing people who have the tough decision of taking a change into a system because everybody is afraid of it and the risk averse to actually have an example to think with so that you could make things move forward David so Nicholas mentioned Simo growing up in South Africa being in England, France, Switzerland but I think more so for Simo and this is very Piagetian in Simo every child is unique and every child you had to understand how is this one thinking what are you doing and Carol Spurry would say building that relationship with them and that's where the deepest learning would happen and so I think of the things you realize is that sometimes you realize why are you working outside the U.S. or why not here we would do things because often overseas you would have more of a chance to do something truly innovative because again with Simo it was fixed with ideas where can we keep moving the ideas learning forward in the best way so the respect I give respect to every child everywhere and still think about what's universal in learning what you can get done so I want to make a quick comment I was originally a panelist but I was asked to comment on one particular thing first of all I would like to suggest to MIT that we obviously have such a rich and incredible set of ideas that someone should really compile the impact Simor has had globally Alexei Semyonov from the Moscow Open Institute for Open Education came up to me and was talking about the incredible impact in Russia and if we had more time I would have invited him to join us but I want to talk briefly about Simor as an activist that was the point that came up so when I first got to know Simor I was writing a very long book on the history of apartheid movement and relations between US and South Africa and this is my mother's husband he's a nice guy from South Africa but I started asking him questions and I discovered that he had an immense repository of knowledge and I also learned that when I asked him a question I had to be prepared for a very precise lengthy answer so if I just said hey what's the difference between the ANC and something else I got this very deeply thoughtful answer but I went and interviewed a cousin of his named Jennifer Davis who is from the American Committee on Africa one of the leading anti-apartheid groups and I mentioned that I knew Simor and she got very quiet and I said do you know anything about Simor? and she said however brilliant Simor may be as a mathematician his courage and his brilliance as a political scientist in our darkest hour far exceeds that so I went back have dinner with this guy looking at him through a new lens and I think it's something he didn't talk about very often but this is a man who came out of South Africa under very difficult conditions where he stood out and was in grave danger of being suppressed at any moment and he so I want to build on that just a little bit we are in a unique moment in American history right now where many of our core values are being attacked across all categories including education where the fundamental values of the republic are in jeopardy and I can't, I think Simor would be surprised that we haven't had more discussion of our civic obligations that flow out of what he has learned and what he taught and so I want to raise that because we're wrapping up today Simor cared passionately about democracy he cared passionately about human rights we had hours and hour long conversations and I think he would want us to reflect not just on all the things we talked about but what are those implications given that some of our core values and maybe even our functioning democracy may be destroyed he would want us to reflect on that so without we only have a short amount of time but what is your reflection on Simor today as an activist taking everything that he stood for how would he be moving forward today I'm reminded of the time Nicholas introduced Simor something here and said Simor when was the last time you were in jail so through him he gave an answer that was so many years was older than he was but it was fundamental but I think you can't think about Simor you can't pull one thing away from another it's integrated so always the idea of in terms of social justice is always deeply there but it wasn't separated from anything else we would do and there was always this motivation for these things but where I was reading something recent that Simor wrote and where he talked about people believing conspiracy theories and after with all this violence and with terrorism why is it important still to study math and he was talking about the type of thinking that's developed and the probabilities are there so if you couldn't believe in these conspiracy theories if you had any sense of probabilities in a real way and so there in this case what you're saying is that he deeply believed in the role of developing critical thinking and where with computation and with mathematics every speaker's been talking about the real world puts his back on your project but it's more not that you're going to become this kind of engineer or that kind of machine but you are going to be able to think deeply through all the way through a deep hard complex problem and be able to come up with a functioning answer or a functioning solution and so the part about social justice is absolutely always been all the way through our work and deeply essential but it was never disconnected from the importance of learning and especially in our case because he would say lots of people have great ideas about other things but what we think best about is how we use computation for learning yes I think one of the key elements and it was mentioned in the previous panel is the idea and the reality of empowering children to be independent thinkers and to stand for what they believe and to act in the world through the things they create to the things they share in the ways in which they collaborate and I want to quote something that a child from the Atlantic coast in Costa Rica the Limón area which is a banana producing area and from a very very poor neighborhood and family said when somebody asked him what is it like to program and he said when I program the computer I feel like I am driving a car and I think that's a fantastic metaphor because driving a car means not only being in connection with a technological object but it means being in control and going somewhere I don't think it was an accident that when we inaugurated the Costa Rican project in January of 1988 many years ago that the title of the newspaper of the article in the newspaper in the first page of La Nación said in good hands children were learning to connect with computers in a culture oriented to transform their lives and to transform society to be better citizens and to be more joyful people in good hands and those were the good hands of Simo and of the team and the community of spirits that he created through the media lab and in connection with all of these international projects so we have one minute left very quickly I would like I remembered something that happened when you asked this question a journalist once asked Simo with all the knowledge that you have if there was one thing one single thing you would want to make sure that children learned what would that be and Simo paused for a while and he said I would like them to learn how to exercise a vision and I thought that was incredibly powerful because whatever situation you are in that you don't like if you exercise that vision and you work hard enough at it and you find like-minded people there's nothing to stop you what a wonderful ending please join me in thanking thank you thank you for your extraordinary leadership good luck with your projects and I know we all want to hear more so we will hang around for the reception be part of that thank you thinking is good for thinking whether we are a 5 year old or a sophisticated scientist what we really have to think about is what produces involvement, engagement what grabs the individual it's much more related to love than to logic in 1984 there was a television program in the Danish television called talking turtle and I happened to watch that and there was this charismatic person there talking about what children could do with computers I was simply so fascinated by that that guy was Seymour Papert what interested me was Seymour Papert view on children and how they can learn through experimentation how they can learn through play education is very little to do with explanation it has to do with engagement, with falling in love with the material I remember the first meeting we had was in a hotel in Boston it was not there at that point in time and Seymour was there, Ms. Resnick was there and Brian Silverman was also there and they demonstrated the logo language and then the physical turtle was fascinating to think of the spirit of logo is to produce a language that encourages an attitude of taking it and changing it shaping it to yourself the essential point about the turtle is its role as a transitional object that is a transitional between the body, the self and abstract mathematical ideas so we thought the turtle that could as easily have been a model that you had created with Lego bricks the children are learning to program they are learning about motion above all they are learning the scientific knowledge is not something separate from their passion for toys by the time Papert was two he was already fascinated by rotating things wheels, gears, pulleys for him gears and wheels had become objects to think with he had no idea that he was preparing himself to become a mathematician but he was one happy moment for me was in 89 when we actually could name Seymour Papert Lego professor of learning research I gave Seymour a chair we built a Lego chair a very nice Lego chair for him playful learning that takes place in the building of such a chair is horrible Seymour at a point in time started talking about the intelligent brick the idea of actually building behavior into your model that was sort of the fascination that we shared the total learning environment in which the child grows up includes school of course the most important parts are in relationship, in play in social forms in art in sensibility to aesthetics all this is part of the developing individual and the computer enters into all of that when we think of how fast the world is changing lifelong learning is really important and it's very very important that thereby we say that children are our own models because they do it all the time when the elevator comes up and hits that little button it'll reverse the direction stop now, get it now nobody really knows what the future will be like but we know that these new technologies these computers will be an important part of it our goal has to make it sufficiently part of the culture of the place that everybody uses it when it's needed Seymour is a fascinating person and there's of course a lot of wisdom in him and especially this about how important it is that children learn through experimentation or as he called it constructionism is a very strong concept that I fully endorse the fact that we share these values that has kept us together for all these years instead of being policemen obliged to force children to learn stuff that they don't want to know can be in the more enviable position of being the source of knowledge and of help for children who need that knowledge in order to do something that comes from their heart so it's really wonderful to have Kel, Kurt Christensen here I know Kel, you and Seymour had such a long productive, creative and special relationship maybe you can just share a little bit about what is it that made it such a special relationship well it was a very special relationship because when I saw that talking turtle program in the Danish television I was fascinated and thought that this person we have to work with and Seymour's wonderful and powerful ideas of children's learning to play and experimentation and that really resonates so well with all the work that we do in the LEGO group and our mission is really to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow and personally I must say every time I met with Seymour there was always he's eager getting all the ideas out and then discuss and there was so much energy and I always enjoyed it tremendously he loved playing with ideas, he loved playing with children and toys I remember many meetings in your office where both Seymour and you were both always tinkering and experimenting so I know in particular Seymour worked with you on thinking about the role of computers and new technologies within the LEGO activities maybe you can say a little bit about the way your interactions on that personally I have always been loving programming I started with programming basic in the early 70s so seeing here the local language was created for children to go to but on the other hand you could make very complex things out of it that reminded me also about that there is this similarity between building with LEGO bricks and programming I think that programming children set themselves a task and they know that it can be done they try out different things if it works it's fine, if it doesn't they just try another thing the same when they set themselves a task when they built with LEGO bricks and they know it can be done and there are always endless possibilities I know the ideas really flowed in both directions so Seymour contributed to the ways technologies got used at LEGO but the ideas from you and the LEGO companies certainly influenced the ideas here I think we did have a fantastic cooperation with Seymour, with you Mitch and all good colleagues here at the media lab over the years and they also one thing more about the turtle also because when I saw that program of course I thought that turtle could as easily, I think that was also in the video by the way, could have been done with LEGO bricks and that was also where it all started in our collaboration I think it was in 88 or 89 we could launch the first interface so that children could plug motors and they could make cars and windmills using the logo language and I think that was fantastic as the first step and Seymour of course also had the idea of the intelligent brick as I said here and we worked very hard together on that also there were many different versions of the programmable brick until finally in 1998 we could launch the LEGO Mindstorms products and we were very happy of course to be able to call the Mindstorms because that was of course the Seymour's fantastic book and the Mindstorms is really a very successful product because it allows children to build behavior into their creations, their robots or the creatures or whatever and so that was for us a very very important next step in our development and Seymour was really honored when he became the LEGO professor as we saw in the video and when Seymour retired and I know that Professorship was renamed the LEGO Third Professorship in Seymour's honor and I've been really honored to hold that chair and have tried to live up to Seymour's visions in our work together but I know you would like to continue to explore more ways to be able to continue to support Seymour's vision and Seymour's ideas Just as we today have talked so much about all Seymour's fantastic powerful ideas and what he has meant to us personally and to mankind I think that it's very important that we continue also to inspire young people to continue working with his ideas and all that he did so therefore we have decided in the LEGO foundation to endow three LEGO Papart fellowships that will then allow some of your graduate students really to study and research in the intersection between play, learning and creativity and we're really so grateful because it will allow us each year to choose three of the graduate students and I know also the idea came up to choose them from three different continents to make sure we have diversity of people who will be doing things we'll choose students who are following in Seymour's tradition and extending and working on Seymour's ideas so we're really excited about the opportunity and really appreciate the opportunity to do that. We really appreciate in this way also to be able to do more in the future with the cooperation fantastic cooperation we have had with Media Lab and all what Seymour stands for. We'll do everything we can to keep alive Seymour's powerful ideas and his playful spirit. Thank you. I think it's best as we come to the closer today to let Seymour have the last word so let me just finish by first thanking Keldman Lego Company again with the new Lego Popper Fellowship and we'll allow Seymour to have the last word. If we project any sort of democratic world we have to assume that education and learning to think differently and that is learning to learn how to think is going to be an essential contribution maybe the essential contribution to that. I feel very deeply committed to the idea that although rationality isn't everything and passion and interests and faith of various sorts count as much nevertheless rationality is a force for the good and the more people are capable of thinking the better the world will be the more they have access to knowledge about the rest of the world the better the world will be.