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Seymour Papert was a great philosopher, whose work on Constructionism has uplifted many children, inspired the OLPC project, and continues to have a huge positive influence on the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo...

Here is the source code to LLogo in MACLISP, which I stashed from the MIT-AI ITS system. It's a fascinating historical document, 12,480 lines of beautiful practical lisp code, defining where the rubber meets the road, with drivers for hardware like pots, plotters, robotic turtles, TV turtles, graphical displays, XGP laser printers, music devices, and lots of other interesting code and comments.

http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/lisp/llogo.lisp

Here is a Logo Adventure game I wrote for Terrapin, the first program I ever sold, which they distributed with C64 Terrapin Logo, because they wanted a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo's list processing capabilities:

http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/logo/adventure.logo

Seymour Papert greatly inspired me, and I applied his work on Constructionist Education to the open source version of SimCity for the OLPC.

http://micropolisonline.com/static/documentation/HAR2009Tran...




Although his methods probably contributed a lot to popularization of computing, as a philosopher the mental model theory of knowledge has been demonstrated insufficient a long while ago, although it remained popular in the AI computer science field for much longer, the problems with that theory were known even during the hey-day of Papert's work.

Just take a look at Hubert Dreyfus' work to better understand the issue.


I don't think constructivism and embodied cognition are too far afield, they both have an emphasis on environmental interaction. That sort of intertwingedness goes along with the general thrust of Dreyfus' argument

(+ here's a link to Dreyfus' essay Why Heideggerian AI failed http://cid.nada.kth.se/en/HeideggerianAI.pdf)


IIRC, I wrote "On the Utilities Disk is an Adventure program written by a typical 14-year-old using Logo." We all had a good chuckle over that. You used overlays with LOAD to navigate across roomsets.


Yes. Knowing the typical 14-year old, if you'd actually have written that program as described, you'd end up in a hell of cascading ifs.


The nice thing was that there was no "main program" or parser, it just extended the Logo interpreter top level to be an adventure game!


wait, doesn't that make it trivial to fiddle with the code and cheat? Well, I guess it kinda already was...


>Here is a Logo Adventure game I wrote for Terrapin, the first program I ever sold, which they distributed with C64 Terrapin Logo, because they wanted a simple non-graphical game that showed off Logo's list processing capabilities

Neat. Think it'll run on UCB? Those Terrapin licenses are expensive.

I think I might need some of your nitrous oxide for the LLogo sources, though. I am not fluent in maclisp. :-)




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