Building Moonshots

WAY 29Build to Learn: Building the future requires teams to test their critical experiences and functions.

About the Way

This way describes how humans learn differently through the process of building. Instead of learning by reading or theory, you gain knowledge by linking the conceptual to the physical and making tangible things. In the academic space, you can trace modern discussions back to Seymour Papert, a polymath who pioneered artificial intelligence with Marvin Minsky at MIT and introduced a constructionist movement in education.¹ The central tenet of Papert's constructionist theory of learning is that people build knowledge most effectively when they are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. He even invented the Logo programming language as a way to prompt children to think about thinking while learning computer programming skills.

Educators at Stanford University shared this belief in a different form. A foundational belief in Stanford's engineering design community has been “build to learn.” This belief has its roots in the pioneering philosophy of Stanford engineering professor John Arnold, who was at MIT before Papert. Arnold's unconventional approach using imaginative artifacts “caused a stir among traditional educators and conservative engineering leaders”² during the 1950s, while American popular press from LIFE to Popular Science magazines idolized him. Stanford engineering professor Larry Leifer brought forward several of Arnold's beliefs from ...