Klarinet Archive - Posting 000002.txt from 2000/03

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] Falling in love
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2000 06:04:48 -0500

I just wanted to say, having written here about toys and tools, and
having said that there is a danger that we may base our posts on the
fact that we have fallen in love with toys....

....that falling in love with toys can be an incredible source of energy
in going ahead.

There is a book written by Seymour Papert (who was one of the designers
of the LOGO language), called 'Mindstorms'. In this book, Papert says
that one of his inspirations when he was young was that he was given a
toy differential gear to play with.

This differential gear later influenced his thought processes in a
variety of ways, including, for example, how he thought about
simultaneous equations.

But the important point for Papert, as he describes it in his book, was
that he *fell in love with his differential gear*. It was this falling
in love that led to his whole career.

Unfortunately I don't have the book to hand; but he went on to say,
roughly, that it would be a mistake to think that we should therefore
give a differential gear to every schoolchild, because everyone is
different.

But that's why he designed LOGO, because he thought that the LOGO
program that a child wrote might play the same role in that child's
intellectual life that the differential gear, by chance, had played for
him.

When I was 9 years old, the inspiring toy was a clarinet.

I'm not trying to knock toys.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE www.gmn.com/artists/welcome.asp
tel/fax 01865 553339

... How do I set a laser printer to stun?

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