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LOGO Still Lives -- New Java-Based Version Released
farrellj writes "Many people were introduced to computer programming using a virtual turtle, or if you were lucky a robotic turtle. Created in the '60s by a bunch of people at MIT, including one of the formost experts on computer aided learning Seymour Papert, it gave a good grounding in programming in a day when BASIC and PASCAL were the only other easily available languages...I use to teach LOGO at a computer lab in Ottawa, but have lost touch with LOGO for many years. Today, a email appeared in my mailbox announcing a new release of LOGO called StarLOGO from MIT...wow...it is done in JAVA, and looks pretty snazzy. It runs on just about any platform, and I think that it again may be a great way to get young kids interested in programming. It took me about 2 minutes to get it running...just untar it, and run a shell script, and I had the enivronment up and running. In a couple more minutes, I was writing programs that created graphical displays that would look great at raves. So I guess it's for kids of all ages!"
Speaking of Logo and Java, RoboCode somewhat reminded me of Logo, although in a less peaceful, less turtlesque style. Maybe that would be Logo for (maybe not quite) grown-ups.
I was in a computer class that taught LOGO in 6th or 7th grade. By that time I was already very familiar w/BASIC and somewhat familiar with PASCAL. I found it to be a waste of my time and actually made me less interested in other languages.
Everyone's experieneces are different I guess but I just don't see how you can show LOGO as instilling the programming bug (no, not intended) into school-aged kids.
My high school CS teacher started us on logo, then took us to pascal. I think pascal was more fun, and he admitted he wanted to do more. He had intended us to write a program that would work with the tcp/ip stack and the real time clock on winblows, but he couldn't get it to work so we gave up on that idea :)
Logo is fun, and logo got me dates with girls!
I was first introduced to logo when my 2-years-younger brother came home from school with a homework assignment. I had learned programming in Basic (ZX81, TS2068, C128), and I think I had started learning C at the time (still in high school). Anyway, my brother was NEVER interested in computers, but he was able to pick up LOGO very quickly. They were mostly writing recursive programs for drawing "snow-flakes" and other shapes.
You should also look at ucblogo and Brian Harvey's 3 books. He has a couple chapters on the above website (including a simple BASIC interpreter written in LOGO and even a pascal compiler in logo!).
I prefer logo to lisp or scheme for some reason. It's a functional language, but you can write procedural code easier than scheme, if you want to. When I get some spare time, I'd like to write a logo plugin for gimp. You can write some 10-line routines to draw amazing graphics.
In elementry school (I'm in jr. high now) one of the teachers ran a summer program on computerized and motorized legos. We would build legos with motors and lights and plug them into an Apple II GS (newer ones pluged into a PowerPC). The computer used the Logo language to control the legos. It was fun, esp. when we figured out how to make a text menu :). (I don't think graphics were supported).
Centralization breaks the internet.