4 ms·

I was very involved with Logo back in the 1970s and 80s. I spent a fair bit of time at BBN working with Wally Feurzeig and crew, and ran a number of Logo worksh

I was very involved with Logo back in the 1970s and 80s. I spent a fair bit of time at BBN working with Wally Feurzeig and crew, and ran a number of Logo workshops for teachers here in British Columbia. I finally gave up when I realized that most of the teachers I worked with saw the pretty pictures produced by the screen turtle as the goal, rather than the deep insights produced by the programming process. For them, Logo was never going to be anything more than an Etch-a-Sketch. Sigh

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
empressplay 5y ago
It's definitely a tough one when thinking about marketing Logo, because the educators do need to be Logo-savvy for it to work in a classroom setting and it's hard to convince them to take the time to learn it properly themselves. That's why I think it's better to try to get contemporary Logo into code camps, because the facilitators are more motivated and have some enthusiasm for it. But we'll see :) Could you please e-mail me at melody at retrocoders.org ? I'd love to chat with you about BBN. We're in Victoria
- vincent-manis 5y ago
  Will do!
- bitwize 5y ago
  That's the problem with just about every well-meaning "computers in education" program, even more recent efforts like OLPC. The teachers have to understand the power of the machine and the insights and abstract critical thinking that can be taught through it. Most teachers are like the sort I grew up with: they would hold floppy disks by sticking their fingers through the hole in the middle. And they mishandled kids even more destructively, treating them like vessels into which it was their job to pour the curriculum.
  - floren 5y ago
    > they would hold floppy disks by sticking their fingers through the hole in the middle. I bet that's a habit from 45rpm records...
jecel 5y ago
I worked on a Logo computer in 1983 but never launched it. Even so I tried to keep up with the Logo community over the years. I was very disappointed to see what schools did with Logo through the 1980s. To me it seemed that the worst problem was that the teachers were gatekeepers - if there was a book they were the ones who had it and they only passed a small fraction of that to the students. Every time I would see a school showing of their student's Logo projects I would see how many pages of the "Apple II Logo" book you would have to read to do that. It normally would be around the first 8 to 12 pages of the 280 page book. The solution would be to put the book in the system. That is what Smalltalk-80 came close to offering. But 8 bit floppy-based computers were not up to that. Eventually the Internet would become a way around the gatekeepers, but by then the idea that Logo had failed had become widespread and we had to wait for Scratch to occupy (not very well) that space.
- andai 5y ago
  Could you elaborate on the current situation? Did Logo do some things better than Scratch?
  - jecel 5y ago
    By "current situation" I mean that with larger disks and the Internet in the mid 1990s it was possible to package a system like Logo with a whole book and a nice library of examples. In the case of Scratch there was a shared website where students could post their projects and look at projects from all over the world. As Alan Kay would put it, being literate is not only being able to read and write but having access to literature. For some reason many people don't take Scratch seriously because of its visual nature. So they do a similar system where you can press a button and see your block as JavaScript text so you can know that you are doing "real programming". The real reason Scratch is limited is because it was created that way on purpose to make it easy to make simple games and animations. It could easily be expanded into a full programming language and the Snap! project at Berkeley did exactly that. https://snap.berkeley.edu/ https://snap.berkeley.edu/ Logo was a full programming language from the start. Early versions didn't even have the famous turtle and focused on text applications. By the time of the 8 bit microcomputers it had become associated with the graphics (and so was used as the world's most awkward drawing program) and limited implementations. 64KB was a huge amount of memory for Basic or Forth, but only allowed the simplest Logo programs to fit and ran them very slowly. This made people think that Logo was just a toy (which was not true) like today they think Scratch is a toy (which is true, though not for the reasons they think).
pge 5y ago
I hear you, but I think it still worked. I was in elementery school in the 80s and learned logo (and had it at home on an Apple ][+). My teachers fit your description - they were most excited by the pictures we were able to make. None of them knew how to code. But that didn't keep the students from having the Aha! moments that logo provided, or from developing an understanding of key programming concepts. It was the interaction with logo that taught us, not what our teachers did or didn't explain to us.
djrogers 5y ago
Thank you! I was one of the kids in school in BC whose life was likely changed by that. In spite of the feelings of the teachers, it worked. One day one of us (may be, maybe it was my friend Ronny, I dunno) figured out that we could open up a magic screen that let us type more than one command, and have them all executed when we were done. We were programming and didn't really know it! I realized years later that I'd learned programming from Logo, and look back on those days in the computer room with great fondness.
- soperj 5y ago
  This is exactly me.
xapata 5y ago
Don't despair. Even if the teachers thought they were just pictures, the students learned more. Logo was my first programming language.
soperj 5y ago
As a kid who grew up using logo in the 80s at school (Alberta though, not BC), it was the pictures that i could make that actually got me to do more than just the basics that the teacher had us go through. I ended up getting a CSC degree, in large part because of fun programming like that. So thank you for your effort regardless.
retr0nerd 5y ago
I was introduced to LOGO sometime around 1981/82 while I was in elementary school. I loved it. My teacher was just as much of a nerd as I was, so we all learned it together. Had it not been for LOGO, I certainly wouldn't be the nerd I am today.
megameter 5y ago
> pretty pictures produced by the screen turtle as the goal, rather than the deep insights I can't help but think "ah, like NFT art". Schools made and prepared us to do exactly this.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

empressplay 5y ago

It's definitely a tough one when thinking about marketing Logo, because the educators do need to be Logo-savvy for it to work in a classroom setting and it's hard to convince them to take the time to learn it properly themselves. That's why I think it's better to try to get contemporary Logo into code camps, because the facilitators are more motivated and have some enthusiasm for it. But we'll see :) Could you please e-mail me at melody at retrocoders.org ? I'd love to chat with you about BBN. We're in Victoria

vincent-manis 5y ago
Will do!
bitwize 5y ago
That's the problem with just about every well-meaning "computers in education" program, even more recent efforts like OLPC. The teachers have to understand the power of the machine and the insights and abstract critical thinking that can be taught through it. Most teachers are like the sort I grew up with: they would hold floppy disks by sticking their fingers through the hole in the middle. And they mishandled kids even more destructively, treating them like vessels into which it was their job to pour the curriculum.
- floren 5y ago
  > they would hold floppy disks by sticking their fingers through the hole in the middle. I bet that's a habit from 45rpm records...

jecel 5y ago

I worked on a Logo computer in 1983 but never launched it. Even so I tried to keep up with the Logo community over the years. I was very disappointed to see what schools did with Logo through the 1980s. To me it seemed that the worst problem was that the teachers were gatekeepers - if there was a book they were the ones who had it and they only passed a small fraction of that to the students. Every time I would see a school showing of their student's Logo projects I would see how many pages of the "Apple II Logo" book you would have to read to do that. It normally would be around the first 8 to 12 pages of the 280 page book. The solution would be to put the book in the system. That is what Smalltalk-80 came close to offering. But 8 bit floppy-based computers were not up to that. Eventually the Internet would become a way around the gatekeepers, but by then the idea that Logo had failed had become widespread and we had to wait for Scratch to occupy (not very well) that space.

andai 5y ago
Could you elaborate on the current situation? Did Logo do some things better than Scratch?
- jecel 5y ago
  By "current situation" I mean that with larger disks and the Internet in the mid 1990s it was possible to package a system like Logo with a whole book and a nice library of examples. In the case of Scratch there was a shared website where students could post their projects and look at projects from all over the world. As Alan Kay would put it, being literate is not only being able to read and write but having access to literature. For some reason many people don't take Scratch seriously because of its visual nature. So they do a similar system where you can press a button and see your block as JavaScript text so you can know that you are doing "real programming". The real reason Scratch is limited is because it was created that way on purpose to make it easy to make simple games and animations. It could easily be expanded into a full programming language and the Snap! project at Berkeley did exactly that. https://snap.berkeley.edu/ https://snap.berkeley.edu/ Logo was a full programming language from the start. Early versions didn't even have the famous turtle and focused on text applications. By the time of the 8 bit microcomputers it had become associated with the graphics (and so was used as the world's most awkward drawing program) and limited implementations. 64KB was a huge amount of memory for Basic or Forth, but only allowed the simplest Logo programs to fit and ran them very slowly. This made people think that Logo was just a toy (which was not true) like today they think Scratch is a toy (which is true, though not for the reasons they think).

pge 5y ago

I hear you, but I think it still worked. I was in elementery school in the 80s and learned logo (and had it at home on an Apple ][+). My teachers fit your description - they were most excited by the pictures we were able to make. None of them knew how to code. But that didn't keep the students from having the Aha! moments that logo provided, or from developing an understanding of key programming concepts. It was the interaction with logo that taught us, not what our teachers did or didn't explain to us.

djrogers 5y ago

Thank you! I was one of the kids in school in BC whose life was likely changed by that. In spite of the feelings of the teachers, it worked. One day one of us (may be, maybe it was my friend Ronny, I dunno) figured out that we could open up a magic screen that let us type more than one command, and have them all executed when we were done. We were programming and didn't really know it! I realized years later that I'd learned programming from Logo, and look back on those days in the computer room with great fondness.

soperj 5y ago
This is exactly me.

xapata 5y ago

Don't despair. Even if the teachers thought they were just pictures, the students learned more. Logo was my first programming language.

soperj 5y ago

As a kid who grew up using logo in the 80s at school (Alberta though, not BC), it was the pictures that i could make that actually got me to do more than just the basics that the teacher had us go through. I ended up getting a CSC degree, in large part because of fun programming like that. So thank you for your effort regardless.

retr0nerd 5y ago

I was introduced to LOGO sometime around 1981/82 while I was in elementary school. I loved it. My teacher was just as much of a nerd as I was, so we all learned it together. Had it not been for LOGO, I certainly wouldn't be the nerd I am today.

megameter 5y ago

> pretty pictures produced by the screen turtle as the goal, rather than the deep insights I can't help but think "ah, like NFT art". Schools made and prepared us to do exactly this.