History of Logo
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History of Logo
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Re: History of Logo
#2Logo rules big times!
Re: History of Logo
#3LOGO changed my life! When I learned it as a kid, it made me realize that software was "castles in the sky" and you could do anything you want. 41 years later and a career programmer, I'm now using Lisp in our most modern product. :-) I'll always be grateful to Papert for his work in creating and teaching LOGO.
Re: History of Logo
#4When I was in elementary school in the 80s, someone in our district retrofit a school bus with two rows of computers running along the sides. The bus would travel to each school in the district once a month or so. We would all walk out to the parking lot, board the bus, and use Logo. It was probably the first exposure to a computer most of the kids in my class had, and I have never forgotten it.
Re: History of Logo
#5There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ) that claims that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the "mess around and figure it out" exploration style of LOGO and Papert ("every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery") is the predominant unquestioned wisdom. Felienne wants more pedagogy fights. It's a worthwhile talk. I love LOGO and I think our generation of programmers are very sympathetic Papert's philosophy due to most of us being self-taught to some degree (you can see the fond nostalgia already on display in the comments here), but Felienne made me think about it more critically.
Re: History of Logo
#6Logo was a hard pill to swallow in the 1980's. It had some neat features 'on paper' but it was hard to appreciate them because it was agonizingly slow on the computers of the day.
It was the first programming experience I ever had where I'd type in my function, and then had to wait a while for the computer to do something to it (it never used the word "compiler"), and then it could run. I remember thinking: this makes programming not-fun. I could write it in assembler faster than I'm waiting for the "...." to dance across the screen.
Re: History of Logo
#7There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ ) that claims that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the "mess around and figure it out" exploration style of LOGO and Papert ("every time you teach somethi…
Thanks for the link! It's a great discussion to have and should be a topic for all learning, not just CS Ed. If you look at the K-12 CS Ed standards defined at the state level, you'll find a generally coherent approach to staged learning of CS, both in terms of computational thinking structure (teach sequential behavior before conditional behavior) and language complexity (Scratch first, Java later). It's also worth considering playful or project-based approaches vs rigorous curricula-based learning... we're lucky to start with playfulness in CS because of the history of Logo. But what about for example, aeronautics? You might really enjoy learning to build and fly a rocket in Kerbal Space Program, but at some point you might yearn for more and benefit from a deep dive into some scaffolded traditional curricula. Then you can come back to Kerbal and apply what you learned, etc etc. Perhaps there's some sort of optimal cadence, different for each person and their interests. What's the analog for CS Ed?
Re: History of Logo
#8Logo rules big times!
Even in 2020, I was pleasantly surprised that my kids school teaches Logo at the elementary school level!
However, I had a hard time convincing parents who were suggesting it to be replaced with Python or a more modern programming language :(
Re: History of Logo
#9Logo rules big times!
Even in 2020, I was pleasantly surprised that my kids school teaches Logo at the elementary school level! However, I had a hard time convincing parents who were suggesting it to be replaced with Python or a more modern programming language :(
There's some merit to both sides. As a kid in the eighties, I remember being annoyed by Logo -- it seemed a toy, and even as I child I wanted to learn the tools with which "real programs" (mostly games) could be written.
Re: History of Logo
#10When I was in elementary school in the 80s, someone in our district retrofit a school bus with two rows of computers running along the sides. The bus would travel to each school in the district once a month or so. We would all walk out to the parking lot, board the bus, and use Logo. It was probably the first exposure to a computer most of the kids in my class had, and I have never forgotten it.
Wow, that was cool. My first exposure to programing was also logo, back in the 80s, back in eastern europe. It was in the form of an afterschool program my father found out about. I loved it. Then when first dabbling in basic my first instinct was to try to draw with it. I think theres something inherently good about computer drawing that attracts kids to computers at early ages, before they are capable of developing interest for abstract ideas and problem solving.
For older kids who want to learn programming I definitely recommend starting with Racket. It comes with cool libraries and small games can be built very creatively. Plus a lot more.