Corkin, Averill, and Nagy-Chow, Sami. Interview with Karen Brennan. “Constructionism + Giggles (Season 2, Episode 4).” The Palette Podcast. SoundCloud, March 2017, www.soundcloud.com/palettepodcast/season-2-episode-4-constructionism-giggles. Web. Accessed 29 Oct. 2017. www.palettepodcast.com/. Web. Accessed 28 Nov. 2017.

This sixteen-minute episode features an interview with Harvard Associate Professor of Education Karen Brennan. Dr. Brennan talks briefly about the maker movement, Seymour Papert’s constructionism, and the intersection of the arts and education.

Karen Brennan facilitates a course on constructionist learning at Harvard called T550: Designing for Learning by Creating. With a background in music and computer science, Brennan completed her PhD in 2012 at the MIT Media Lab where she was a member of the Scratch team and Lifelong Kindergarten Research Group directed by Mitchel Resnick. The Palette Podcast was created in 2015 by students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and promotes the importance of the arts in education.

This interview serves as a good introduction to constructionism and provides insights into constructionist thought and philosophy. The discussion is thought provoking in overcoming the common myths and misconceptions where people often feel they cannot do, or contribute to, things like high art or computer science because they feel those fields are only reserved for the “highly gifted” or “special” class. Papert discusses these cultural myths and learning phobias in the second chapter of his seminal work, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.

WORKS CITED

Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. 2nd ed., Basic Books, 1993.