Powerful ideas
Concepts that, once grasped, change how you think about everything else — the real curriculum Papert cared about.
For Papert, the goal of education was not facts or skills but powerful ideas — concepts with enough reach that learning one reorganises your whole way of thinking. Feedback, recursion, systematic debugging, the difference between a bug and a failure, the notion that you can build a model and run it: these travel far beyond the classroom.
A powerful idea is appropriable (you can make it your own), connected (it links to things you already know and care about), and generative (it opens doors to more ideas). The computer mattered to Papert precisely because it made certain powerful ideas — especially ideas about process, procedure, and systematic thinking — newly graspable and tinkerable by children.
Much of this site is an attempt to collect the powerful ideas of computing in one place. Start with the idea encyclopedia.