Seymour Papert, an emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who invented the influential Logo programming language, has been seriously injured in a traffic accident in Hanoi, Vietnam. Mr. Papert is now in a coma, according to The Associated Press.

The professor, who is 78 years old, had traveled to Hanoi for a conference on technology and mathematics education. He was struck by a motorcycle while crossing a busy Hanoi street, according to an official at Hanoi University of Technology.

Most recently, Mr. Papert has worked as an adviser to Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child project, which plans to provide children in developing nations with low-cost computers. It’s hardly surprising that the Mr. Papert would work with One Laptop Per Child. The project lies at the intersection of two of his great passions and areas of expertise: computer science and educational theory. Throughout his career -- whether designing Logo, advancing artificial intelligence, or advocating Constructionist pedagogy -- Mr. Papert has used technology to shape how we learn and how we think about learning. --Brock Read

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