ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, when very few teachers were using com puters in their classrooms, a common belief was that technology would revolutionize teaching and learning. Seymour Papert, in ventor of LOGO, had recently written his now classic book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, in which he de scribed how computers allow children to think in ways that had not previously been possible. He predicted then that computers could change traditional educational processes. Many people hoped then that machines could do what 100 years of writing in educational psychology and philosophy had not done-bring about broad change in educational practices that would make classrooms engaging places for children to work on authentic problems. In hindsight, that expectation greatly underestimated the resiliency of institutions to resist change, as Papert recognized in his later work, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age o f the Computer (1993).
