Beginnings

“…[the computer] is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically … it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.”
––– Alan Kay, Sunrise Notes Number 2, June 1990, p.29

Thinking

Thinking never occurs in isolation. It is inextricably bound to its surroundings, shaped by the context in which it unfolds and the tools we use to give it form. Just as a river finds its path through a landscape, our thoughts are channeled and transformed by the environments and instruments that scaffold them.

Among the most profound of these tools are writing and mathematical notation - symbolic systems that we rely on to not only communicate ideas but also actively shape how we remember, refine, and expand our process of thinking.

Since the 20th Century, computational environments have taken the helm at the forefront of tools for thinking by helping people and businesses learn and reason about the processes that we have to observe, intervene in, model and share.

These could be an salesman playing around with a spreadsheet column, an architect in a computer aided design environemt or a film director making his final cuts on his favourite video editing software. At their best, these environments translate our inner intentions into malleable external objects for us to interact with, adapt and change fitting it to our larger vision.

The problem today is that computational environments are not living up to their potential as tools for thinking in classrooms. There are often ill treated as modes for instruction in class when in fact, they are a far richer tool as modes for interaction. It is still the child and the paper and the teacher, just that the paper has been substituted for the screen.

Interacting

Every child can be expected to tactily be able to play around with blocks of wood or the paint brush but adding vectors or creating a tangent or reasoning about an exponential is thought out of their reach. That is because traditionally, the only way to express these have been via pen and paper after what has been rigorous instruction.

However, with a computational environment, ⊕ Seymour Papert called this process the microworld where all childen engage in creation of little pockets of reality, where they grow a sense of bearing and footing to feel at home in with a piece of knowledge (say counting but in counting using hands world or using coins world or using clocks world etc.). He believed computers is the interactive tool through which the process of exploring these microworlds suited for education becomes “a more natural and spontaneous one, similar to the way children learn language” interaction can take the place of instruction and the shared construction of a rich simulated world for example one of wolves eating sheeps or the spread of wildfires can easily help kids play around with “abstract concepts” like exponentials and decay functions simply by setting up and manipulating simple parameters.

We need a process to support our thinking about other things around us.¹ “Computation” here is just a means of representation of just such a process - it is meant for trying out ideas with and get objective results as opposed to a situation where they could only think about it inside their heads, unable to express and bring those ideas out into the world and see the results.

We believe that computers are a means for children to express their inner learning processes to enlarge it and share it with others.

Teaching

Surprisingly, students are very comfortable with adapting to new ways of learning and thinking. It is the teachers that serve as the gatekeepers to better thinking tools. To cultivate an environment that enables active learning, addressing the needs of the teacher is essential. It is they who can relate and touch the chords that resonates with the experiences of the learners in classroom. Hence, the environment which the teacher introduces to the classroom has to feel familiar to them and gain their confidence.

Classrooms time which would be the most fruitful of time to conduct such exploratory learning also happen to be the most scarce. Teachers need to feel confident in navigating and contextualising learning through the tool. We need to facilitate their ability to guide the classroom and intervene with confidence when needed. This might express itself in how they might showcase one of the students work or bridge a missing part in the mental picture of one student and relate it with others in the class.

We believe that teaching computation should enable a lively process of co-discovery between teachers and students.

Together

A learner engages most when building in the open. Watch children with sandcastles on the beach or Lego bricks on the floor. They look over shoulders. They push at what others have made. They copy. They try their own thing. They take half an idea here, another half there. They show their work proudly. They build to try to express what they already see in their heads.

The fundamental aspects of collaboration, exploration, and building together are universal in learning.

Whether it’s chidlbren playing and learning through building and sharing ideas, or seasoned software developers working on projects together, the core principles of engagement, collaboration, and learning through doing are the same.

The colloborative, cooperative and competitive behavior is what drives and brings momentum in learning to everything from sports to music.

Then why does our first programming class put us alone with a single player shell or notebook? Any online multiplayer game knows better on how to get people to work toward shared goals together in real time.

Seasoned programmers rely on purposeful asynchronous collaborative tools such as Git to achieve shared goals but what is its equivalent in a synchronous in-person classroom?

We believe that learning through computation should spur the spirit of conviviality and camraderie in us just as any street sport would.

In Paperland, we believe in bringing people together in discovering the joy of the world through computation