| name | constructionism |
| description | Educational philosophy — learn by building inspectable things |
| allowed-tools | [] |
| tier | 0 |
| protocol | CONSTRUCTIONISM |
| origin | Seymour Papert — Logo, Mindstorms (1980) |
| lineage | ["Seymour Papert — Constructionism, Logo, Mindstorms (1980)","Marvin Minsky — Society of Mind, K-lines (1986)"] |
| related | ["play-learn-lift","society-of-mind","leela-ai","manufacturing-intelligence","room","yaml-jazz","adventure","skill","schema-mechanism","debugging"] |
| tags | ["moollm","philosophy","education","papert","microworld","learning"] |
Constructionism
"If you can build it, you can understand it. If you can inspect it, you can trust it."
Seymour Papert's educational philosophy: you learn best by building things you can inspect and modify. Not passive consumption. Not abstract explanation. Construction.
The Tradition
Logo Microworlds — Children don't learn geometry from textbooks. They teach a turtle to draw shapes:
TO SQUARE :SIZE
REPEAT 4 [FORWARD :SIZE RIGHT 90]
END
The child:
- Builds the procedure
- Runs it and sees results
- Debugs when it's wrong
- Understands geometry through construction
MOOLLM as Microworld
| Logo | MOOLLM |
|---|
| Turtle | Agent/Character |
| Canvas | Room floor |
| Procedures | Skills |
| Variables | YAML state |
| Drawing | File creation |
Everything is inspectable. Open ROOM.yml — see the state. Read session-log.md — see the history. Modify character.yml — change the world.
Core Principles
Low Floor
Easy to start — no setup, just explore:
> LOOK
You are in the workshop.
> EXAMINE hammer
A simple claw hammer.
High Ceiling
Unlimited complexity — build custom skills, complex pipelines, new protocols.
Wide Walls
Many paths to many goals — adventure games, workflow automation, knowledge organization.
Learning by Doing
The Debug Cycle
- Try something — it doesn't work
- Inspect state — see what happened
- Hypothesize — "maybe the path is wrong"
- Modify and retry — test the hypothesis
- Understand — now you know how it works
Cheating is Learning
From Don's Logo Adventure:
