{"id":1101,"date":"2026-05-06T01:17:45","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T00:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/rumpus\/?p=1101"},"modified":"2026-05-06T01:34:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T00:34:56","slug":"from-logo-turtles-to-ai-citizens-a-20-year-journey-in-learner-empowerment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/rumpus\/index.php\/2026\/05\/06\/from-logo-turtles-to-ai-citizens-a-20-year-journey-in-learner-empowerment\/","title":{"rendered":"From Logo Turtles to AI Citizens: A 20-Year Journey in Learner Empowerment"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Dr Alexandra Okada<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The Seed – Brazil, 2004<\/h2>\n

I remember the moment clearly. A nine-year-old in my class looked at the screen, folded his arms, and said: “Can I use something else? MicroWorlds is too hard.”<\/p>\n

I was a teacher then\u00a0 working across both private and public schools in S\u00e3o Paulo.\u00a0 And that single sentence became a research question that has never quite left me. I was not using Microworld to show off my own coding. I was using it because I believed, with every instinct I had developed from reading Seymour Papert and Paulo Freire and working alongside Jos\u00e9 Armando Valente, that the learner who struggles with the tool is the learner who truly learns<\/em>. The difficulty is not the obstacle. It is the curriculum.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Seymour Papert’s constructionism taught me that children learn best when they are making something shareable, something meaningful \u2014 not completing exercises designed by adults. Paulo Freire reminded me that education is never neutral: it either domesticates or liberates. And Jos\u00e9 Valente, whose work on Logo from MIT to Brazil\u00a0 shaped a generation of teacher-researchers including me, gave us the practical language for what happens when a child cycles through description, execution, reflection, and debugging. These were not abstract theories to me. They were the air in my classrooms in Brazil.<\/p>\n

So when that boy said Microworld was too difficult, I did not simplify the task. I made the\u00a0reason<\/em>\u00a0to do it more compelling. We built a virtual museum of Mondrian’s paintings \u2014 together, collectively, in Logo \u2014 and by the end, those same children were saying:\u00a0“I liked to build the museum with my colleagues, and when it was finished, it was nice to visit all the paintings.”<\/em><\/p>\n

That is the moment this twenty-year journey began.<\/p>\n

\n

Remarkable People – The UK, 2014<\/h2>\n

After completing my PhD with Simon Buckingham Shum, I had the honour of meeting Mike Sharples, a renowned scholar in UK EdTech, whose early work on children writing poetry with Logo alongside three Edinburgh schoolboys\u00a0 I deeply respect.\u00a0 I see his work, and that of other scholars of computational thinking, as part of a long, continuous cycle: researchers and teachers across decades, continents, and technologies, all asking the same essential question \u2014 who holds the creative agency?<\/p>\n

In Sharples’ 1978 project, he wrote the LOGO procedures himself and invited the boys to use them. That was already radical for its time, and what those boys learned about grammar and meaning through generating poetry was genuine and deep. But in my S\u00e3o Paulo classroom in 2004, my pupils wrote the code. The syntax was theirs. The bugs were theirs. The paintings \u2014 and the pride \u2014 were entirely theirs.<\/p>\n

This is not a criticism of Sharples. It is a description of a\u00a0cycle continuing<\/em>. Beth Almeida, a renowned scholar on teachers education enhanced with technologies and e-curriculum\u00a0 who influenced so many of us working in Brazil, understood this rhythm: each generation of teachers-researchers must push the agency one step further toward the learner. That is the direction of travel. That is what Freire called conscientiza\u00e7\u00e3o<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 critical consciousness developed through one’s own action in the world, not received from above.<\/p>\n

\n

The Horizon Expands: Europe-Brazil, 2024<\/h2>\n

By the time I was leading the CONNECT project \u2014 an EU Horizon 2020 initiative across the UK, Greece, Romania, Spain, and Brazil \u2014 the technology had transformed beyond anything I could have imagined sitting with those children in S\u00e3o Paulo. We were now working with over 1,500 teachers and 50,000 students. I was no longer the classroom teacher. I was the Scientific Coordinator, the PI, designing frameworks and cross-national methodologies.<\/p>\n

And yet \u2014 look at what the students were\u00a0doing<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Greek teenagers in underserved communities were\u00a0coding image-recognition algorithms in Scratch<\/strong>\u00a0to detect wildfires in drone photographs. Brazilian students were\u00a0building AI-powered inquiry maps<\/strong>\u00a0about drought and indigenous land rights, presenting their findings to their own communities in Portuguese. UK students were\u00a0designing AI-assisted renewable energy campaigns<\/strong>, pitching to engineers. All of them applying CARE-KNOW-DO in their projects and using CARE-KNOW-DO to reflect and explain what was transformed in their journeys and how they as transformers changed in their world.<\/p>\n

In every case, CARE\u2013KNOW\u2013DO was not just the\u00a0path<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 it was the\u00a0map each learner drew of their own path<\/em>. Students used it to reflect on and articulate their own transformation:\u00a0I began to care about this place and these people. I learned what an algorithm actually does and why its biases matter. I did something real with that knowledge \u2014 and I changed in the doing of it.<\/em><\/p>\n

This matters because education systems have historically spoken\u00a0at<\/em>\u00a0underserved communities rather than\u00a0with<\/em>\u00a0them \u2014 treating them as objects of policy, not subjects of their own learning. Their knowledge, their languages, their contexts were ignored. CARE\u2013KNOW\u2013DO flips that. A Brazilian student presenting AI-mapped findings to her own community in Portuguese is not being spoken at. She is speaking\u00a0with<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 and\u00a0for<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 her world. That is the transformation. And it echoes Freire’s most fundamental insight: that liberation begins the moment a learner recognises themselves as the\u00a0author<\/em>, not the object, of their own story.<\/p>\n

The teacher was not coding. The researcher was not coding.\u00a0The learner was coding.<\/em><\/p>\n

Twenty-one years. Different continent, different language, different technology, different scale. Same philosophy.<\/p>\n

\n

CARE\u2013KNOW\u2013DO: What Twenty Years of Living This Taught Me<\/h2>\n

The CARE\u2013KNOW\u2013DO model did not arrive fully formed from a literature review. It grew from lived experience \u2014 from classrooms, from conversations with colleagues and mentors, from watching what happens when young people are trusted with genuine tools, genuine problems, and “hard fun” (Papert’s phrase, which Kieron Sheehy’s work on inclusive playful learning has helped me think with).<\/p>\n

CARE<\/strong> is what I saw in 2004<\/span> when a nine-year-old dedicated a Mondrian painting to his mother and published it on the internet.
\nAnd <\/span>in 2025, emotional investment <\/span>\u00a0including ethical connection\u00a0to something beyond the self, with a teenager in Athens who begins to care about Mediterranean forests not as a lesson topic but as something fragile and worth protecting.<\/span><\/p>\n

KNOW<\/strong>\u00a0is what happens when you have to actually understand how Logo syntax works, how a machine learning algorithm classifies images, how AI can both help and harm \u2014 because you are\u00a0building<\/em>\u00a0with it, not just reading about it.<\/p>\n

DO<\/strong> is the moment a student in Manaus presents her AI-mapped analysis of Amazon drought to her community, or a student in Athens publishes code that detects deforestation. Likewise, UK students pitch for energy-saver funding using AI, and explain concepts and investment through AI. Not a simulation. Real action, in the real world, for real stakes.<\/p>\n

These three dimensions align with UNESCO’s AI competencies \u2014 Understand, Apply, Create \u2014 but they are grounded in something deeper: the conviction that sustainable futures for people and planet require young people who are not merely literate about AI, but who are\u00a0authors<\/em>\u00a0of it. Who CARE enough to use it ethically. Who KNOW enough to use it critically. Who DO enough to use it transformatively.<\/p>\n

\n

The Cycle Is Not Finished, May 6th\u00a0 2026\u00a0 00:30<\/h2>\n

Right now, as I write this, I am working on my next research bid, my next paper, supervising my next PhD students, designing my next course, and relearning with my son in hospital. The questions I am living with are the same ones that have always animated me, only sharper and more urgent: How do we ensure that generative AI in “lifeworthy” education \u2014 inspired by Perkins \u2014 empowers learners rather than replacing their agency? How do we build the kind of open schooling ecosystems that make AI literacy a matter of social justice, not just technical skill? How do we prepare this generation\u00a0 and the next\u00a0 to be citizens of an AI-mediated world, rather than its subjects?<\/p>\n

I do not have all the answers. But I have learned where to look for them: in CARE-KNOW-DO, with the learners themselves.<\/p>\n

\n

A Note on This Blog Post \u2014 Authorship and Integrity<\/h2>\n

This post was drafted with Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) as a writing assistant. However, its initial draft would not and could not exist in its form without: the lived experiences, research, and intellectual biography of Dr Alexandra Okada; her direct prompting and editorial direction throughout; her published articles including the 2004 EDMedia paper and the 2025 AIED\/CONNECT journal article; and the vast body of her own content, reflections, and scholarly conversation that she brought to this process.<\/em><\/p>\n

The ideas, the memories, the intellectual lineage I had the opportunity to encounter \u2014 Papert, Freire, Valente, Almeida, Buckingham Shum, Sharples, Sheehy, Perkins, and the thousands of students and teachers across Brazil, the UK, Greece, and beyond \u2014 belong to the author. <\/em><\/p>\n

Claude Opus 4.7 (Anthropic) mediated the retelling. I, Dr Okada, authored this narrative (not generated, but lived), edited it, and published it in my own voice. AI-assisted writing is not AI-authored writing. Attribution matters.
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

References;<\/p>\n

Okada, Alexandra<\/a>\u00a0(2004).\u00a0Collaborative learning using Microworld and WebMapQuest.<\/a>\u00a0In:\u00a0Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2004<\/i>, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE), pp. 2695\u20132698.<\/p>\n

Okada, Alexandra<\/a>\u00a0(2025).\u00a0Playing the Whole Game: How Open Schooling with STEM and AI Empowers Students to Transform Lives and the Planet.<\/a>\u00a0Revista e-Curriculum<\/i>, 23, article no. e73918.<\/p>\n

Okada, Alexandra<\/a>; Sherborne, Tony; Panselinas, Giorgos and Kolionis, Georgios (2025).\u00a0Fostering Transversal Skills Through Open Schooling Supported by the CARE-KNOW-DO Pedagogical Model and the UNESCO AI Competencies Framework.<\/a>\u00a0International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education<\/i>, 35(4) pp. 1953\u20131998.<\/p>\n

Sharples, M. (1978). Poetry from LOGO, Working Paper 30, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh. DOI: 10.13140\/RG.2.2.19158.87368.<\/p>\n

\n

Dr Alexandra Okada is an Assoc. Professor at The Open University, UK, Scientific Coordinator of the CONNECT-Science project (EU Horizon 2020), developer of the CARE\u2013KNOW\u2013DO pedagogical model, and lead of the Colearn Network, Brazil.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Dr Alexandra Okada The Seed – Brazil, 2004 I remember the moment clearly. A nine-year-old in my class looked at the screen, folded his arms, and said: “Can I use something else? MicroWorlds is too hard.” I was a teacher then\u00a0 working across both private and public schools in S\u00e3o Paulo.\u00a0 And that single … <\/p>\n

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