Yet some mathematical concepts can seem abstract and teachers have struggled over the years to help children to understand them. Mathematics is a subject we all need to understand the basics of - it underpins much of our other learning and empowers us in daily life. For all these reasons, we were delighted to hear her present at a Raspberry Pi Foundation computing education research seminar. As well as authoring literally hundreds of academic papers on mathematics education, including on Logo programming, she has received a number of prestigious awards and honours, and has served as the Chief Advisor to the UK government on mathematics in school. Thus for many years the links between mathematics and programming have been evident, and we were very fortunate to be able to explore this topic with our research seminar guest speaker, Professor Dame Celia Hoyles of University College London.ĭame Celia Hoyles is a huge celebrity in the world of mathematical education and programming. Educational programming languages such as Logo were widely used in both primary and secondary education settings during the 1980s and 90s. He believed that programming could give children tangible and concrete experiences to support their acquisition of mathematical concepts. Papert, together with others, developed the Logo programming language in 1967 to help children develop concepts in both mathematics and in programming. He developed the theoretical approach to learning we now know as constructionism, which purports that learning takes place through building artefacts that have meaning and can be shared with others.
We owe much of what we have learned about children learning to program to Seymour Papert (1928–2016), who not only was a great mathematician and computer scientist, but also an inspirational educationalist. “In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building.” – Seymour Papert, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas, 1980
0 kommentar(er)
