Re: LOGO-L> Is Logo old technology?

[climber@unidial.com (Jim Baker)]

The point of Logo is half what you say; the other half is its motivation
and that is to condition help kids develop reflective awareness of
combinatorial object construction. Maybe that's what you're saying.


>I recall an MIT Logo group meeting in 1977 where Seymour Papert described
>Logo as an attempt to take the best ideas from computer science and make
>them accessible to children. Most of those ideas had come from the Lisp
>programming language. I think this was a wonderful choice when it was made
>30 years ago.
>
>Computer science has moved forward and Logo has barely changed. Yes, LCSI
>Microworlds Logo adds some nice user interface gadgets and a very
>impoverished way of running programs in parallel. (Concurrent programs can't
>really synchronize and can only communicate via global variables.) StarLogo
>does borrow ideas from computer science but its SIMD model of computation is
>not flexible enough for the wide range of things that kids might want to
>program computers to do. It is a good thing only when dealing with problems
>that are naturally "data parallel". Object Logo and Multi Logo were attempts
>to borrow from computer science object-oriented programming and parallel
>processing respectively. But they didn't catch on.
>
>Logo was a good attempt at "child engineering" the ideas in Lisp. And more
>modern Logo implementations have kept up a bit by including menus, buttons,
>mice, windows, and the like. But here Logo is just trying to catch up with
>systems like Visual Basic. And both systems pale compared to the ease of use
>of user interfaces in computer and video games.
>
>During the last 20 years I have tried 4 times to make a new and better
>programming system for kids that shares Logo's
>pedagogic/epistimologic/constructivist view. Each time I tried to follow the
>original design goals of Logo by "child engineering" the best ideas from
>computer science. First I tried to introduce object-oriented programming
>(SmallTalk 72 was doing the same thing but was a corporate secret at the
>time). Then logic programming. Then visual programming.
>
>ToonTalk (www.toontalk.com) is my most recent attempt. It is based upon what
>I call "animated programming" where a child does all her programming by
>manipulating concrete objects inside of an animated game-like world.
>ToonTalk is a general purpose language where a child programs by training
>robots, giving birds messages to deliver, manipulating boxes, text pads, and
>number pads, using animated tools, loading trucks and more. The child is a
>character in this world and can even fly her helicopter to travel between
>houses or to see an overview of an ongoing computation.
>
>ToonTalk borrows ideas from computer science about how to program with
>communicating independent processes. Everything happens in parallel in
>ToonTalk. There are ways of expressing process spawning, communication,
>synchronization, and termination. It also borrows from demonstrative and
>visual programming research.
>
>Anecdotal evidence is that kids enjoy ToonTalk and master it relatively
>quickly. (See www.toontalk.com/English/users.htm) A large pan-European
>research project just began on the first of the month that will be building
>what they call "playgrounds" on top of ToonTalk and Logo. (See
>www.ioe.ac.uk/playground) They plan to do careful studies of kids using both
>systems. I'm betting the ToonTalk half comes out ahead.
>
>I think Logo is a good thing - it is just that it could be so much more than
>it is.
>
>Best,
>
>-ken
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Jim Baker
Understanding begins with finding first principles.


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