The Maker Revolution

CHAPTER 8Education

The Maker Movement is helping to create a revolution in US educational institutions. It is helping the move to “constructivism,” “project-based education,” “the flipped classroom,” and “maker education.” As early as the 1960s, MIT professor Seymour Papert was predicting a future in which personal computers in the classroom would become as ubiquitous as pencils and paper. Seymour rocks. He is a world-renowned mathematician, learning theorist, and educational-technology visionary whose ideas and inventions transformed how millions of children around the world create and learn. Working from his perch at MIT, he helped change the way many educators work and view their role in the classroom. He was an acolyte of Jean Piaget, another revolutionary in education and child development…but I digress.

Seymour was convinced early on that children would use computers not merely as sophisticated calculators but as instruments to enhance their learning, creativity, and innovation, as well as learn about their own learning processes. Widely considered the world's foremost expert on how technology can provide new ways to learn and teach mathematics and thinking in general, Papert has been one of the most significant voices for bringing computers, experimentation, and real-world learning into the classroom over the last sixty years.

At the time, computers cost thousands of dollars, and Papert's ideas were met with skepticism. In response, he often told a playful parable about ...