Jean Piaget Jean Piaget was born in Switzerland on August 9th, 1896. He was the oldest of three children, and the only boy. His father was Arthur Piaget, a professor of medieval literature. His mother was Rebecca Jackson, and his godfather was the Swiss scholar Samuel Cornut. In 1923, he married Valentine Chatenay. The couple had three children, Jacqueline, Lucienne, and Laurent. Piaget died in Geneva on September 16, 1980, after a brilliant scientific career made of over sixty books and several hundred articles (Papert, 1999). Piaget’s greatest contribution was to found the field of cognitive development. He believed children are the biggest manufacturers of their own development, as man’s capacity for logical thought is not learned but embedded along with hair color and sex, in his genes. In other words, a child cannot be forced to develop understanding any faster than the rate at which his powers mature to their full potential, so there is a limit to what overeager parents and teachers can achieve. On the flip side, a child who does not get the chance to apply his developing abilities and test limitations may never reach his full intellectual capacity (Pramling, 2006). According to Jurczak (1997), Piaget believed in four stages of cognitive development:
• Stage 1: Sensorimotor – Newborn to Age 2
The child’s primary concern is mastering his own innate physical reflexes and extending them into interesting or pleasurable actions. During this time, the child becomes aware of himself as a distinct and separate physical entity. He also realizes the objects around him have a separate existence.

• Stage 2: Preoperational - Age 2 to 7
In this stage, a child learns to represent objects by words and to manipulate the words mentally, just as he learned to manipulate physical objects in stage one. A child is able to manipulate his environment