Empowering a society of future users of information technology: A longitudinal study of an application in early education

This paper presents a six-year study of the use of computers in a Greek primary school, based on the premise that, in contrast to current technocentric views regarding the use of information technology in the Greek educational system, computers can be used as tools for self-enhancement. The aim of the school project was to infuse a child-centred pedagogy, through the learning of Logo programming, into the whole of the school’s society, i.e. all children and teachers. Within this context, the authors have identified and explored how children may learn programming through the process of forming ‘naive’ or locally applicable theorems concerning key programming ideas such as the use of primitives, structuring a problem by means of writing procedures, and constructing and working with generalised notional objects by means of defining procedures with variable inputs. They discuss the emerging interrelated educational and technological aspects concerning this kind of learning, and then set these against the challenge to exploit the developing technology further in order to design expressive media of increasing flexibility and power, and to focus on specific learning domains.