Constructionism and AI: A history and possible futures

Conference item

Constructionism, long before it had a name, was intimately tied to the field of Artificial Intelligence. Very soon after the birth of Logo, Seymour Papert set up the Logo Group as part of the MIT AI Lab. Logo was based upon Lisp, the first prominent AI programming language. Many early Logo activities involved natural language processing, robotics, artificial game players, and generating poetry, art, and music. In the 1970s researchers explored enhancements to Logo to support AI programming by children. In the 1980s the Prolog community, inspired by the Logo community, began exploring how to adapt logic programming for use by school children. While there has been over forty years of active AI research in creating intelligent tutoring systems, there was little AI-flavoured constructionism after the 1980s until about 2017 when suddenly a great deal of activity started. Among those activities were attempts to enhance Snap! with new blocks for speech synthesis, speech recognition, image recognition, use of pre-trained deep learning models, and word embeddings, as well as blocks to enable learners to create and train deep neural networks. We close with speculations about possible futures for AI and constructionism.

Authors: Kahn, K; Winters, N

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Constructionism
• Publication date: 2020-05-26
• Acceptance date: 2020-01-28
• Event title: Constructionism 2020
• Event location: Dublin, Ireland
• Event website: http://www.constructionismconf.org/
• Event start date: 2020-05-26
• Event end date: 2020-05-29
• ISBN: 9781911566090
• Language: English
• Keywords: Snap!; deep neural networks; constructionism; FFR; logo; machine learning; logic programming; artificial intelligence