Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Under these circumstances, my parents decided to send me overseas. My third uncle, Mr. Zhang Sihou, was then a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, and he chose for me to apply to Harvard University. Why choose Harvard? First, Harvard is a world-famous institution; second, Harvard is in Boston, and my third uncle could look after me nearby. But Boston also had another world-famous school, one that specialized in science and engineering: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Why, after my father had clearly told my third uncle that I was going to study science and engineering, did my third uncle still not choose MIT for me? About this, I later asked my third uncle. He smiled and said, “The you I knew was the you at Nankai in Chongqing, when you loved the humanities. Later I heard you wanted to study business. It wasn’t until you got to Hong Kong that I heard you wanted to study science and engineering. I thought you should have time to gradually establish your own interests. Rather than rush you into the very specialized MIT, it would be better to let you have a buffer period at Harvard. Besides, Harvard’s science and engineering are also top-notch—it’s just not as specialized as MIT.”"

"As if there were some force arranging things in the dark, Mr. Morris Chang’s third uncle, with foresight, first chose a year at Harvard for him, rather than immediately entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which most directly matched his specialty. In his year at Harvard, he immersed himself almost in all directions in Western civilization: from Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Austen, and Shaw, to Churchill’s World War II memoirs and the speeches of successive U.S. presidents; at the same time he subscribed to major American newspapers and periodicals, listened to music, watched theater, visited museums, attended ball games and dances, and made American friends."

"At nineteen I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I learned my livelihood skills at the highest institution"

"Kjeld Kirk had managed nearly to tenfold LEGO’s revenue without abandoning LEGO’s core idea. Under his leadership, the company expanded the range of LEGO products, while delving even deeper into the product idea itself, among other things by collaborating with psychologists and experts in children’s play. For example, in 1989, Seymour Papert was appointed LEGO Professor of Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and LEGO Futura—the LEGO development division—opened an office near MIT. Papert had developed an educational theory he called “constructionism.” According to the theory, learning is particularly successful when children are engaged in constructing something they enjoy making, such as a sandcastle, a poem, a machine, a story, a computer program, or a song. Equally importantly, Papert collaborated with LEGO on a programming language that allowed children to control the things they built with LEGO elements and program them to move and respond to, for example, light. The personal computer had made its way into homes, and with it came computer games, which increasingly captured children’s playtime. For Kjeld Kirk, it became crucial for LEGO to take a new evolutionary step. His father had moved LEGO from wood to plastic. Now Kjeld Kirk saw it as his task to elevate LEGO from physical building blocks to digital bytes. The question was just how."