Every maker of video games knows something that the makers of curriculum don't seem to understand. You'll never see a video game being advertised as being easy. Kids who do not like school will tell you it's not because it's too hard. It's because it's--boring
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that engagement, not difficulty, is key to learning.
Seymour Papert highlights a crucial difference between the world of video games and formal education: while video games attract players by presenting challenges that are fun and engaging, educational curricula often fail to captivate students due to their lack of excitement. The quote suggests that the appeal of video games lies in their ability to provide stimulating experiences, contrasting with the often monotonous nature of traditional schooling, which leads to disinterest among students.
In practice
This quote can be used during educational workshops to emphasize the importance of engaging students.
The word constructionism is a mnemonic for two aspects of the theory of science education underlying this project. From constructivist theories of psychology we take a view of learning as a reconstruction rather than as a transmission of knowledge. Then we extend the idea of manipulative materials to the idea that learning is most effective when part of an activity the learner experiences as constructing a meaningful product.
Nothing enrages me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization...I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities.
The scandal of education is that every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery.
My basic idea is that programming is the most powerful medium of developing the sophisticated and rigorous thinking needed for mathematics, for grammar, for physics, for statistics, for all the "hard" subjects.... In short, I believe more than ever that programming should be a key part of the intellectual development of people growing up.
A programming language is like a natural, human language in that it favors certain methaphors, images, and ways of thinking.
...for the object of education is to teach us to love beauty.
Give a child love, laughter and peace, not AIDS.
Excellent teachers showered on to us like meteors: Biology teachers holding up human brains, English teachers inspiring us with a personal ideological fierceness about Tolstoy and Plato, Art teachers leading us through the slums of Boston, then back to the easel to hurl public school gouache with social awareness and fury.
Children will go with any story as long as it's good, but white adults sometimes think that if a black child's on the cover, it is perhaps not for them.
Young screenwriters are always very frustrated when they talk to me. They say, 'How do we get to be a screenwriter?' I say, 'You know what you do? I'll tell you the secret, it's easy: Read 'Hamlet.' You know? Then read it again, and read it again, and read it until you understand it. Read 'King Lear,' and then read 'Othello.'
I still remember the realization in college at Flinders University in Australia that mathematics was not just an abstract game of symbols but could be used as a tool to analyze and understand the modern world.
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