Seymour Papert's Vision for Early Childhood Education? A Descriptive Study of Head Start and Kindergarten Students in Discovery-Based, Logo-Rich Classrooms.

Seymour Papert’s vision for early childhood education involves using Logo, a child-friendly computer language. He envisioned a discovery, or self-directed, method of teaching and learning. This article describes three observational studies conducted in classrooms that were attempting to implement Papert’s vision. Data from 9 kindergartners and 5 Head Start children are reported that show what children were doing and with whom they were interacting when they used Logo throughout the school year. All children spent the bulk of their time constructing. No gender differences were found among the kindergartners in behavior, although social configuration differences among the kindergarten boys and girls were found. Head Start children showed more variation in behavior and social configuration than the kindergartners. Developmental, classroom, and racial differences between the Head Start and kindergarten studies are discussed. Seymour Papert's Vision and Logo In his 1993 introduction to the second edition of Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, Seymour Papert wrote: I see Logo as a means that can, in principle, be used by educators to support the development of new ways of thinking and learning. During the 1970s, we had demonstrated that children of almost any age could learn to program in Logo under good conditions with plenty of time and powerful research computers. I have seen hundreds of elementary school children learn very easily to program, and evidence is accumulating to indicate that much younger children could do so as well. (pp. xiv, xvi , 13) Logo is a child-friendly computer language that was developed by Seymour Papert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. One way for children to use Logo is through a software program called MicroWorlds TM (see Figures 1 and 2). This graphical software package allows children to create their own scenes (worlds) and program icons to move. Children can create pictures and develop shortor long-term projects. Another way for children to use Logo is through a LegoTM product commonly called Lego-Logo (see Figures 3 and 4). This product incorporates a small, but relatively heavy (compared with other Lego pieces), computerized and battery-operated RCXTM Lego piece (see Figure 3) that can be programmed to move the child’s Lego structure by using the computer language Logo to control Lego motors. This Lego piece is called a programmable brick by its developers (Resnick, Martin, Sargent, & Silverman, 1996). Figure 1. Head Start students work with MicroWorlds Logo on laptops. Figure 2. Head Start teacher assists student with MicroWorlds project. Figure 3. Kindergartners build using Lego-Logo with yellow RCX and gray battery box. Figure 4. Kindergartners work on Lego-Logo projects. Although a venerable body of research on the use of Logo in early childhood environments, including preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade classrooms, has developed since the mid1980s, none of these studies describes the continuous classroom involvement of young children in Logo-rich environments that Papert envisioned. This article describes three studies that followed children in one kindergarten classroom for 2 years and children in a Head Start classroom for 1 year. All children had the opportunity to use Logo multiple times per week as part of their regular classroom curriculum (see Figures 2 and 4). Data were collected using an interval recording method (Katzdin, 1982) during the time that children were engaged in Lego-Logo activities to show frequencies and proportion of time that children spent interacting with Logo in various ways, as well as various social configurations during children’s interaction with MicroWorlds and Lego-Logo. Review of the Literature