The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 173

CHAPTER 29
A Low Floor + High Ceiling
for Mathematics Education
George Gadanidis
“The Fields Institute has been an integral part of math education
knowledge development—facilitating access to deep thinkers, and
fostering opportunities to ‘think-with-them’.”
The first Fields Institute Symposium that I helped organize
was on the topic of Online Mathematics Education, but
it quickly expanded to address the broader subject of how
computers can change mathematical learning. In planning
the event, which ran in February 2003, I recall talking on the
phone with the roving computer scientist and visionary Alan
Kay, co-developer of what we now refer to as the computer
“desktop.” I invited him to be a keynote speaker and he
agreed, adding: “Seymour Papert is here with me. Would
you like him to come, too?” Papert, a mathematician at
MIT and one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence,
was internationally recognized as the seminal thinker about