viii If the brief history of the personal computing industry has taught
us anything, it is that the past is a prelude to what we can expect from information technology devices in the future. It
has also demonstrated that often the more counterintuitive propositions are the ones that quickly become part of the
collected wisdom of our age. [John Sculley, Chairman & CEO, Apple Computer, Inc. Apple lured
Sculley away from Pepsi because they wanted him to apply his marketing skills to the personal computer market. Steve Jobs
successfully sealed the deal with his legendary pitch to Sculley, asking him whether he preferred to "sell sugar water for
the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?" (Wikipedia)]
xiii A central theme of Mindstorms is that people seldom
get anything exactly right on the first try.
xiii Intellectual activity does not progress... by going forward step-by-step
from one clearly stated and well-confirmed truth to the next... On the contrary, the constant need for course corrections...
is the essence of intellectual activity.
xv Mindstorms emphatically proposes the idea of "bricolage" as a model for general scientific theorizing
xix Slowly I began to formulate what I still consider the fundamental fact about learning: Anything
is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models... What an individual can learn, and how he learns
it, depends on what models he has available.
xxi The computer is the Proteus of machines. Its essence is its universality, its power
to simulate. [JLJ - "Protean" has positive connotations of flexibility, versatility and adaptability (Wikipedia).]
p.5-6 Programming a computer means nothing more or less than communicating to it in a language that it and
the human user can both "understand." [JLJ - Programming is much more than communicating in a common language. I
would say that computers are not so much programmed as commanded by humans to follow an exact sequence
of data gathering, processing and display/output/storage operations, usually in a script for convenience, for
purposes and/or strategy determined by humans. Someone with money becomes convinced that a software product could
be of value for him. A software manager is obtained to acquire the vague or missing requirements, set the artificial
deadlines which will not be met, acquire programmers who are mostly ignorant of the impossibility of meeting the demands,
and then beat them up when the deadlines are missed.]
p.10 You can't think seriously about thinking without thinking about thinking about something. [JLJ - you
can think about thinking in general. So you can be thinking without thinking about something specific.]
p.11 My interest is in the process of invention of "objects-to-think-with," objects in which there
is... embedded knowledge
p.57 A square can be produced by the commands
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90
FORWARD 100
RIGHT 90 [JLJ - notice how the machine is commanded by the human. The machine does what it is told
to do. It does not know that it drew a square. The human had the plan to draw the square and commanded the machine to
perform steps which resulted in a square being drawn. Where does the intelligence lie, in the machine that drew the
square or in the human who wrote these commands?]
p.100 getting a computer to do something requires that the underlying process be described, on some
level, with enough precision to be carried out by the machine.
p.186 In my vision, technology has two roles. One is heuristic: The computer presence has catalyzed
the emergence of ideas. The other is instrumental: The computer will carry ideas into a world larger than
the research centers where they have incubated up to now.
p.206-207 Jean Piaget's work... teaches us that from the first days of life a child is engaged in an enterprise
of extracting mathematical knowledge from the intersection of body with environment.
p.214 The best learning takes place when the learner takes charge.
p.215 If Piaget had not intervened in my life I would now be a "real mathematician" instead of being whatever
it is that I have become.
[back cover] Mindstorms is the book that started the computer revolution in schools.
