Seymour Papert obituary
Seymour Papert, who has died aged 88, had a profound impact on education, and pioneered the use of computers as an aid to learning. Papert's visionary research put robot turtles into tens of thousands of schools. He also co-authored the Logo programming language, and was involved with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, which delivered education-oriented laptops to children across the less-developed world. Decades of working with the toy company Lego on Lego/Logo, which linked the world of Lego construction with the world of Logo programming, led to the launch in 1998 of the Lego Mindstorms range of robotics toys, which was named to honour Papert's most influential book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980).
The influence went both ways. Scratch, the leading programming environment for children, is based on enabling children to snap together encapsulations of computer code on their screens in much the same way as they would snap Lego bricks together in the physical world.
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