Back to the Future

        

         I had a visceral reaction to Papert’s two articles from the 1970s.  Simply by the way they look, with the old IBM typeset brought back middle school days with memories of my first electric typewriter, carbon paper and mimeograph machines (look it up, millennials!) It also reminded me of an experience that had a significant impact on me and that I can now, after decades, put in context by way of this week’s readings on computer science. 

 

         My father was, at that time, the General Counsel for the Atomic Energy Commission which would later become the Department of Energy. He worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory which was contracted by the government in 1947 with a “desire to explore the peaceful applications of atomic energy.” The Laboratory had a broader mission: to perform basic and applied research at the frontiers of science, including nuclear and high-energy physics; physics and chemistry of materials; nanoscience; energy and environmental research; national security and nonproliferation; neurosciences; structural biology; and computational sciences. “Over its history, Brookhaven Lab has housed three research reactors, numerous one-of-a-kind particle accelerators, and other cutting-edge research facilities responsible for discoveries leading to many advances for science and society received seven Nobel Prizes and also a National Medal for Technology and Innovation."

 

         Thanks to my father’s interest and desire for his daughter to be exposed to new educational experiences, he arranged for my fifth-grade class to have a tour of the facility which included the control room of the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron.(Until 1968, the AGS was the highest energy accelerator in the world, slightly higher than its 28 GeV sister machine, the Proton Synchrotron at CERN, the European laboratory for high-energy physics.)

Control Room for the

Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at BNL

 

         Tours for the general public were not yet permitted and only VIPs from the government contracting agencies were allowed to enter the BNL buildings. My father was instrumental in beginning the discussions around bringing in student groups which would later become a fixture of the BNL facility. He understood the importance of experiential learning and, influenced by his friend William Higinbothom, believed that computers would ultimately meet their destiny to educate young children by way of playful interaction with games as learning tools.

 

         Side Note: In 1958, on a government visitor’s day at BNL, William Higinbotham and Robert Dvorak had demonstrated Tennis for Two, a small analog computer game that used an oscilloscope for its display. (This was the forerunner to Pong.) AlthoughTennis for Two had been disbanded by the time my class had our visit, there were still real treats in store for us.

Tennis for Two Display

 

         We were ushered into a room full of whirring machines and were told that it was a computer (the whole room!) and that it could perform many thousands of computations per second and, even more importantly to us kids…it could play games! Each of us got our little hands on those controls and played a game of Tic Tac Toe with one of the worlds most advanced computers. (Remember that Matthew Broderick movie, Wargames?  I remember laughing when I saw that scene with him doing just that.) We were also told that one day computers would be much smaller and that people could have them in their homes and offices. No doubt we were dubious.

         I called my father in Israel yesterday to ask him about this recollection. He is now in his late 80s but has full faculties and, like many long-term memories, he recalled that field trip vividly. He said that one of the boys in my class had asked of the scientists there, “Did you spend a whole lot of money just to make toys for us to play?”. The scientist replied something along the lines of “All of the greatest things begin small. These are not toys, but an early hypothesis.” If my father recalls it this way, I have no doubt this is what transpired.

 

         In reading Papert’s articles from that time, I was able to join in the thinking and imagining of the power that logical, ordered thinking, in a form appealing and accessible to young students could be. Papert suggests that the teaching methods of the time were stifling and that his grander vision of education included the necessity of learning by doing. Further, that technology wasn’t something to ‘add’ to education but rather that pedagogy is itself a technology and a useful tool for capturing that essential mind space that allows for both critical thinking and imagination.

 

         I loved reading the descriptions of the early Turtle work and felt connected to that history by what we’ve been doing in class.  The process of ordering the commands as a set of geometric possibilities transforms the power to create into the hands and minds of young learners. How I wish I could have been introduced to math in this way!  Instead, I was a girl in a public school with all-male math teachers and a classic system of lectures, memorization and homework problems which resulted in bad grades and a bad self-image when it came to math. A true “mathaphobic” was created. Fortunately, in college I had my first female math teacher and did quite well in statistics, thank you very much.

 

         Only slightly more stirring than the 1970s articles was the forward to Papert’s, Mindstorms which almost had me weeping with recognition.  His description of his relationship to cars, to gears and to mathematics resonated with me in terms of my relationship to music. (Of course, he had me at his Star Trek reference!) 

 

         When I read his line, “one day I was surprised to discover that some adults—even most adults—did not understand or even care about the magic of the gears,”  I remembered the moment when it occurred to me that not everyone could read music, write notation or even follow a musical score and (horrors!) some people don't even care. The home I grew up in was filled with music and musicians.  My mother was a fine violinist and I began piano lessons early, followed by music theory and then several other instruments.  Papert's vision of “a new kind of learning environment” that demanded “free contact between children and computers” was the relationship I had with music and instruments. Little did I know that I was learning “code”.

 

         It only occurred to me, reading the passages in Mindstorms, that there is a useful relationship there for me to explore.  Computer = Instrument.  I could learn to play if I could learn the code, the language necessary to make it sing.

 

         Last week after class, one of my classmates reached out to ask me, “when a person hears music, how does that then get translated onto the music staff?”  What a fabulous question!  Again, I needed to remind myself that this is not knowledge that everyone possesses. In describing to him the ‘decoding’ of pitch and rhythm into symbols that are agreed upon and recognized, I heard myself describing my own relationship to my work in Python.  

 

         Writing, creating and notating music is combinatorial thinking. It’s systematic and has the purpose of creating something in the end that is first internalized before being expressed. It also is flexible and changeable. The application of this thinking to how I can approach computer science is obvious.  

 

         Papert wrote Mindstorms in the 1980s and his powerful ideas have been made manifest through a technological revolution and the mindset and determination of educators to find ways of bringing it into the schools and classrooms.  The next steps are only limited by imagination.

 

         It was a great pleasure to read these writings by Papert and they sparked a curiosity in me to read more. 

 

~ J