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By now, it is "old news" that the Government of Ontario introduced a new Grades 1 to 8 math curriculum, but for a few days in June, 2020, social media was abuzz with commentaries and judgments by pundits of all stripes and degrees of veracity. The old debates about "back to basics" and "discovery math" resurfaced along with reflections on the inclusion of "financial literacy."
The day after the press conference announcing the new policy document, I received a message from a former collaborator, Peter Skillen. He had "tweeted" his negative reaction to the claim that for the first time in the province, computer programming would be included in the curriculum"!, and I "liked" Peter's comment. The exchange that followed was the catalyst for this column in that it evoked many memories of our work together as coding pioneers in this province.
Peter was a "Computers in Education" consultant with the former North York Board of Education at the same time that I held a parallel position with the Board of Education for the City of Scarborough. Peter and I were early adopters of LOGO-the first programming language developed for children who wrote the commands to control the movements of a "turtle"-either in the form of a small mechanical robot or a graphic object on the computer screen.
Peter and I were deeply entrenched in the LOGO community in Ontario and held leadership roles with the Educational Computing Organization of Ontario (ECOO), spearheading a special-interest group in LOGO for many years.
As a result, we also enjoyed many experiences of a lifetime because of collaborations with provincial leaders, including Drs. William Higginson, Dale Burnett, Ronald Ragsdale, and Gary Flewelling. Among the most memorable was the chance to meet (for what would be the first of many times), the venerable Seymour Papert, who was in Kingston for a launch celebration of an important 1985 provincial report about the implementation of LOGO in Ontario: Computers, children and classrooms: A multisite evaluation of the creative use of microcomputers by elementary school children: Final Report.
Known as the "father of educational computing," Dr. Seymour Papert (a colleague of Piaget and the founder of constructionism-a way to learn and solve problems by trying, testing, and playing around)...