Children’s Machines

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ChildrensMachines-exhibit

This exhibit features a collection of rare hardware and software that embodies Seymour Papert’s constructionist learning theory as he set forth in Mindstorms and other works. The collection includes fun toys like a Roamer, and TI-99 Sprite Logo system, crickets and vintage Lego/Logo systems. All items in the exhibit are functioning and available for interaction. ¹

LCSI’d Apple Sprite Logo

This is a video of a child playing with Logo in the New Media Museum’s Children’s Machines Exhibit featuring a working LCSI Apple Sprite Logo board at the Vintage Computing Festival 9.1 East in Wall, NJ (April 2014).

LCSI’s LYNX

Play with an online version of Logo.

LYNX (Logo Computer Systems Inc.)

Here’s a link to another online version of Logo to try.

JS Logo Logo Interpreter (Calormen)

On the Web

The Gears of My Childhood (Seymour Papert, Foreword to Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas)
Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (Seymour Papert, 1980)

Micro Worlds: Transforming Education (Seymour Papert)

Learning and Computers (Robert W. Lawler)

History of Logo (Cynthia Solomon et al., Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages)

Logo Tree Project Paper (P. Boytchev)
Logo Tree Project Web Site (P. Boytchev)

What Is Logo? (Logo Foundation)
Logo History (Logo Foundation)

AI Memos (1959 – 2004)
MIT Logo Memos (1971-1981)

Exhibit Notes
1 Hopper, M.E. (2014, April). Children’s Machines [Exhibit]. Vintage Computer Festival East, Wall, NJ.

This exhibit was shown at Vintage Computing Festival East (2014), and it consisted of a sample of artifacts from the New Media Museum’s Learning and Computing Collection which includes many versions of the Logo Programming Language as well as an extensive archive of related documentation and other historical materials.

There is a more extensive version of this exhibit called Learning & Computing that is part of the NEW Computer Museum’s Virtual Museum, and it includes content related to the Thinking about Thinking about Seymour memorial event held at the MIT Media Lab on January 26, 2017.