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2016 strikes again. :( Seymour Papert was "co-creator of Logo" in much the same way that Doug Engelbart was "creator of the mouse". Their ideas were bigger than something you can fit in a headline. Papert believed that computers had a unique potential to help us learn and think. Anyone interested in computers or education should check out his book Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas .
We played with it with my son and it brought back memories from the 80s when the French government made a big push on Logo in the schools.
Anecdote: Logo was used in French 80s National "Plan Informatique Pour Tous" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous (Computing for all), running on Thomson MO5 terminals distributed in many schools. Kids (6-9yo I believe) would learn to "program" using it. For the younger ones it was mostly about moving that infamous turtle, and that was it. It was still something utterly magical, even though the l…
Just yesterday I finished "Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams" by Resnick who builds heavily upon Papert's work. Mindstorms is on my backlog. I have fond recollections about my first contact with Turtles. It didn't shape me or anything like that, but I'd like to take Logo out again and play with it. Is there a recommended modernish Logo (running on Windows), or should I simply go to Processing?
A favorite quote: [O]n my reckoning, the fraction of human knowledge that is in the [school] curriculum is well under a millionth and diminishing fast. I simply cannot escape from the question: Why that millionth in particular?
Anecdote: Logo was used in French 80s National "Plan Informatique Pour Tous" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_informatique_pour_tous (Computing for all), running on Thomson MO5 terminals distributed in many schools. Kids (6-9yo I believe) would learn to "program" using it. For the younger ones it was mostly about moving that infamous turtle, and that was it. It was still something utterly magical, even though the l…
I remember playing with logo on MO5. The teacher used a TO7. IIRC we managed to get some geometrical figures using loops, like eg a "square-y spiral."
Something I wish I could investigate; was the network infrastructure. I don't know if my school was special but there was a bit networked server that could communicate with other schools (we even had online contests). I also remember seeing its screen trashed. Teacher said "there's a virus.".
Turtles, turtles all the way down.
RIP
Scratch is the spiritual successor to Logo.
As Scratch becomes more and more popular, it has been sad to say that there is a tension between the spirit of Scratch and commercialization. Scratch is all about exploration and making mistakes and experiential learning. However, there is a deluge of companies who are trying to create curriculums for Scratch that fit into the traditional School lesson models (canned, cut and dry).
Here are some of the better alternatives:
Google has developed the CS First program which uses Scratch. The interesting thing about this program is that it tries to scale the problem of teaching CS by making it less necessary for the teacher to know CS.
There is also a curriculum guide for Scratch.
Thanks for your work, Mr. Papert