Disempowering ideas is taking away that magic, that flare that we sense when a person is describing a particular concept with both depth and passion. According to Papert, schools have a “bias against ideas in favor of skills and facts—an idea aversion;” they are so good are disempowering ideas. I cannot approve more. How many of us have hated some subjects at school and then felt curious and interested in domains after hearing about them or perceiving them AT LAST in their “empowered” form, uttered by scientists in magazines or videos, or expressed in some mind-blowing projects?
Papert speaks of “constructionism” which involves externalizing one’s ideas as a way to develop them.
“Ideas get formed and transformed when expressed through different media, when actualized in particular contexts, when worked out by individual minds… To Papert, projecting out our inner feelings and ideas is a key to learning. Expressing ideas makes them tangible and shareable which, in turn, informs, i.e., shapes and sharpens these ideas, and helps us communicate with others through our expressions” (Ackerman, p. 4). He also argues that “a constructionist use of computers increases the likelihood of [encounters with empowered ideas] by making the process more visible both to the informed observer and to the children themselves.” Thus for Papert, teaching children how to program enables them to externalize their ideas, think about thinking, and develop artifacts through which they can encounter ideas in their empowered form as well as “form and transform” their thinking. It is as if that programming may allow children to operate in the “Zone of Proximal Development” by scaffolding their learning.
“Ideas get formed and transformed when expressed through different media, when actualized in particular contexts, when worked out by individual minds… To Papert, projecting out our inner feelings and ideas is a key to learning. Expressing ideas makes them tangible and shareable which, in turn, informs, i.e., shapes and sharpens these ideas, and helps us communicate with others through our expressions” (Ackerman, p. 4). He also argues that “a constructionist use of computers increases the likelihood of [encounters with empowered ideas] by making the process more visible both to the informed observer and to the children themselves.” Thus for Papert, teaching children how to program enables them to externalize their ideas, think about thinking, and develop artifacts through which they can encounter ideas in their empowered form as well as “form and transform” their thinking. It is as if that programming may allow children to operate in the “Zone of Proximal Development” by scaffolding their learning.
For Papert, a programming language (with specific attributes) could afford opportunities to learn and create different from the ones afforded by the languages we speak and write. This is due to the fact that programming languages are rich ones that expand the repertoire of a person’s expressive tools. In the languages that we speak, we could write poems, sing, lecture, say moving speeches and so on. In programming languages, we speak “code” and our products could be transformed into visual objects, sounds, electrical signals to move robots etc. While the mediator of a spoken language is a human mind (i.e. we speak so that our words may be analyzed by another human), the mediator of code is a computer (we code so that our words are analyzed by a computer)—and the results are very different.
Programming languages are definitely not meant to replace our languages, but as echoed by Papert, they could be excellent ways to learn some ideas which are hard to fathom in their abstract form. By transforming our ideas into products, such as electrical signals or videos, the abstract is concretized and we are better equipped to think about and understand ideas. Moreover, through concretizing our ideas in products that we invent, we re-empower ideas.
While tinkering on Scratch, I noticed that languages also limit us because there is a particular way to do and say things. Although programming can open our horizons, I was wondering how “thinking through programming,” i.e. through thinking via a code, may put limits on our thinking processes. Not sure what you think about that!
