Mindstorms

Resources

Reading & watching list

The primary sources. If you read and watch only the things on this page, you'll understand most of what this site is about — and you'll meet the ideas in the words of the people who had them.

Start with these

If you read and watch only five things, make it these. Each one rewires how you see the computer.

  • book

    Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

    Seymour Papert, 1980

    The book this site is named for. Begins with the gears of his childhood and ends with a new theory of learning. Warm, radical, and still ahead of us.

  • paper

    As We May Think

    Vannevar Bush, 1945

    The memex essay. Where the dream of computing as a tool for thought begins. Free to read at The Atlantic.

  • talk

    The Mother of All Demos

    Douglas Engelbart, 1968

    Ninety minutes that contain most of interactive computing, performed live in 1968. Watch at least the first twenty.

  • talk

    Inventing on Principle

    Bret Victor, 2012

    The talk that relit the live-programming fire — and a model for finding a principle to organise a life's work around.

  • paper

    A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages

    Alan Kay, 1972

    The Dynabook paper. The vision that drove Xerox PARC, and the standard against which today's tablets fall short.

Papert & constructionism

  • book

    The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer

    Seymour Papert, 1993

    Papert's follow-up to Mindstorms, on why schools resist the very tools that could transform them.

  • paper

    Constructionism

    Seymour Papert & Idit Harel, 1991

    "Situating Constructionism" — Papert's clearest short statement of the theory in his own words.

  • site

    Scratch

    MIT Media Lab, 2007

    Logo's living grandchild. The largest constructionist learning environment ever built.

  • book

    Lifelong Kindergarten

    Mitchel Resnick, 2017

    By the creator of Scratch and Papert's successor at the Media Lab. Projects, passion, peers, and play.

Alan Kay & Smalltalk

Tools for thought

  • paper

    Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

    Douglas Engelbart, 1962

    The founding document of intelligence augmentation. Dense, but the framework still has no equal.

  • paper

    Man-Computer Symbiosis

    J.C.R. Licklider, 1960

    The essay that imagined — and then, through ARPA funding, brought about — the partnership of human and machine.

  • book

    Computer Lib / Dream Machines

    Ted Nelson, 1974

    A two-books-in-one manifesto for the personal computer, by the man who named hypertext. Gloriously eccentric.

  • paper

    How can we develop transformative tools for thought?

    Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen, 2019

    A modern, deeply considered essay carrying the Bush–Engelbart–Kay tradition forward. Also itself a tool for thought.

History & future of programming

  • talk

    The Future of Programming

    Bret Victor, 2013

    Performed as if it were 1973. A warning against forgetting that today's conventions were once open questions.

  • paper

    Notation as a Tool of Thought

    Kenneth Iverson, 1979

    The APL inventor's Turing Award lecture. On how notation amplifies and directs the thoughts we can have.

  • book

    Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

    Abelson & Sussman, 1985

    SICP. Builds Lisp's metacircular evaluator and teaches you to see programs as a medium for ideas. Free online.

  • paper

    Worse is Better (The Rise of Worse is Better)

    Richard P. Gabriel, 1991

    Why crude designs win. A short, troubling, endlessly cited essay on how computing ideas actually spread.

  • book

    Hackers & Painters

    Paul Graham, 2004

    Essays on making, on Lisp, and on programming as a creative craft. A good on-ramp to the Lisp worldview.