Mindstuff

Abstract

Seymour Papert's book Mindstorms, first published in 1980, has had a profound impact on the ideas (and lives) of a generation of educational technologists and designers. This paper re-examines several of the most compelling ideas from Mindstorms in the light of recent advances that blend computational technology and materials science. In some respects, this growing détente between the physical and virtual lends greater force to Papert's ideas than did the original examples in the book, centred as those ideas were on the then current portrait of the desktop computer.