"The fundamental fact about learning: Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can't, anything can be painfully difficult." [0]
Although Papert is most known for Logo, he did not believe learning how to program was specially good in itself.
It is the fact that the computer allows the child to model almost everything (at almost no cost) that allowed that child to develop and fall in love with a topic, the same way he fell in love with gears at a very young age.
In his own words [1]: "It did not occur to me that anyone could possibly take my statement to mean that learning to
program would in itself have consequences for how
children learn and think. [...] But encouraging
programming as an activity meant to be good in itself
is far removed, in its nature, from working at
identifying ideas that have been disempowered and seeking ways to re-empower them."
[0] Papert - "Mindstorms" in the Foreword: 'The Gears of My Childhood'
[1] Papert - "What’s the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power"
"A modern-day Montessori might propose, if convinced by my story, to create a gear set for children. Thus every child might have the experience I had. But to hope for this would be to miss the essence of the story. I fell in love with the gears. This is something that cannot be reduced to purely "cognitive" terms. Something very personal happened, and one cannot assume that it would be repeated for other children in exactly the same form.
My thesis could be summarized as: What the gears cannot do the computer might. The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power to simulate."
Although Papert is most known for Logo, he did not believe learning how to program was specially good in itself.
It is the fact that the computer allows the child to model almost everything (at almost no cost) that allowed that child to develop and fall in love with a topic, the same way he fell in love with gears at a very young age.
In his own words [1]: "It did not occur to me that anyone could possibly take my statement to mean that learning to program would in itself have consequences for how children learn and think. [...] But encouraging programming as an activity meant to be good in itself is far removed, in its nature, from working at identifying ideas that have been disempowered and seeking ways to re-empower them."
[0] Papert - "Mindstorms" in the Foreword: 'The Gears of My Childhood'
[1] Papert - "What’s the big idea? Toward a pedagogy of idea power"