Seymour Papert's book "Mindstorms" is a foundational document in the Constructionist theory of education. Learners learn best from the world by building things in it and physically testing its bounds, and teachers in this tradition don't teach "at" learners, but create rich "microworlds" full of insight for them to explore.
This talk will discuss my work using the Emmy computer algebra system and its powerful physics and differential geometry engine to animate microworlds instantiated beyond the laptop's glass. We'll explore a tabletop interface built for kids to explore gravity, and robots tricked by Lisp into acting like orbiting bodies. These tools represent an attempt to smuggle Papert's view of education and learning into modern classrooms, libraries and living rooms.
Sam Ritchie
Researcher, Mentat Collective
Sam is a researcher at the Mentat Collective, currently working on a series of interactive, multiplayer computational textbooks for exploring mathematical physics and other forms of modeled reality. He has worked as an engineer at (Google) X, Stripe, Twitter, and founded Paddleguru and Racehub. Sam is most well known in the software world as the author of Summingbird, Algebird, and SICMUtils, and as the maintainer of Cascalog. He has a secret identity as a mountain athlete and amateur aircraft mechanic, and lives with wife Jenna and daughter Juno in Boulder, Colorado.
----
Recorded Sept 22, 2023 at Strange Loop 2023 in St. Louis, MO.
thestrangeloop.com