This Wednesday, two of us from Canidu had the honor of visiting one of Shanghai’s LEGO Learning Centers (http://semia.com).  We were delighted to find quotes by Seymour Papert and Jean Piaget on the walls — two greats who pioneered revolutions in what we know about learning and cognitive stages:

Papert is particularly noteworthy for us — he cofounded the MIT Media Lab, developed the Turtle programming language for children called Logo, was one of the first to advocate giving computers to children — and is a direct intellectual  of our project.

Canidu came from a research project done in the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab.

The LLK are the torch carrier’s of Papert’s work and today’s developers of Scratch, a block-based programming language for children.  Thanks to their sponsorship of this project’s early stages as research, we are here today, hoping to carry on the tradition of constructivist-based learning through developing models of the world and learning about electronics through play.