“I had a computer class based on Logo that managed to make me bored and disinterested with stuff like this” That’s not Logo, that’s the teaching. The whole poi

“I had a computer class based on Logo that managed to make me bored and disinterested with stuff like this” That’s not Logo, that’s the teaching. The whole point of Logo is that it should be 99% self-taught. The teacher’s job is to teach the bits that aren’t naturally discoverable (see my three steps above), and to offer hints and nudges towards rich new areas for exploration should they bog themselves down in old, crude inefficiencies and repetitions. Bad Logo teaching is making kids memorize what all the buttons are called and what each one does when you push it, of setting “problems” that have one right answer which the student must return or is penalized for being wrong. Yes the “turtle” was limited, and if all you ever did was draw “turtle graphics” with it then, yeah, you’d quickly grow bored. But being limited to turtle drawing only was a limitation of the hardware and software of Papert’s time, plus the inability of most adults—particularly those in charge of the purse strings—to see the need to expand that platform to provide other opportunities as well. That damned turtle should’ve been just the first of a myriad of Logo “expansion packs”, but those damned grown-ups couldn’t see that because they lacked the imagination to do so. (Though if they had, they’d have been terrified by the thought: creating kids who think for themselves and can run circles around them—inconceivable!) Because all those adults saw Logo as was just another hoop to teach students to mechanistically jump through in rote-taught lessons before putting it away and moving onto teaching the next hoop, not as an open-ended user-led tool to be put in the hands of the kids so that they can explore and experiment and teach themselves while pursuing whatever it is that is of interest to them. That’s the worst thing about authoritarians: all they ever want to do is to make more of the same.