5 ms·

In hindsight this make a lot of sense. Growing up, it didn't. I did my schooling in a small Indian city where from Grade 3-5 (that's approx 8-10 year old) we we

In hindsight this make a lot of sense. Growing up, it didn't. I did my schooling in a small Indian city where from Grade 3-5 (that's approx 8-10 year old) we were given access to Logo in the computer room and instructed to make things (very basic stuff, initially, and progressively interesting things like spirals etc). It was quite baffling then, till, say start of my undergrad (age 18), on what was the point of learning to control a turtle using simple commands. It hit me finally, as I was trying to learn actual programming. A lot of people (in my circles) say that learning to program is intuitive, easy. I have never believed that. To teach something like HTML/CSS/How to use MS Word etc would be far, far worse experience (I'm looking at you, second tier Indian schools) than learning to move a turtle using simple commands. If nothing else, it brings home the idea of moving commands to actuate things on the computer. PS: I suppose you can make the argument that this is also accomplished by video games but I hold that syntactically coherent commands (LT 90; FD 10) give a better insight into command-action nature of interaction than (Up arrow; Up arrow; move mouse to enemy; left click).

pradn 4y ago
The great thing about systems like LOGO are that you can even implement them without a computer! A really easy way to get kids excited about programming is having them give LOGO-like instructions to "robots", their classmates, parents, or teachers. There's the extra fun factor of reversing roles of authority in such a setting. I've helped teach CS to high schoolers for a few years. In some years, we've used visual systems like this. In my experience, they help kids get started with programming really easily. They can slowly learn more and more programming concepts with immediate visual feedback. But, in all classes, they get stuck in learning to abstract or plan solutions ahead of time for more complex problems. That's a hard jump with every method of teaching CS, though. In a sense, the immediacy of visual programming can make it hard for them to slowly develop long-range planning and reasoning skills. I'm not sure if a purely symbolic approach is better, still. I do think a bit more practice-oriented learning may help - think multiplication table worksheets.
- 8ig8 4y ago
  Big Traks follow Logo-like programming. I loved mine… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak
  - dtagames 4y ago
    I almost lost my mind over the idea of a "programmable toy" when Big Trak came out. I loved it but not really programmable enough, right?
    - jazzyjackson 4y ago
      16-command memory, looking it up. Apparently it's pretty easy to drop in an Arduino and go from there! Cool video: https://youtu.be/D-guBA1_T_Y https://youtu.be/D-guBA1_T_Y
johnwalkr 4y ago
I had the same experience. We used logo in elementary school on Apple IIes and I thought we were just "learning computers." Looking back I realize that one teacher went out of her way to teach us something useful with the oudated hardware available (this was in 1992). Other teachers of the same class just let us play around with a print shop program, and in junior high we had a computer class which was just typing practice, again using Apple IIes. They were old and unmaintained, they didn't even have software available -we had to type into the command prompt for 45 minutes. In high school I took a computer science course, but quickly dropped it because it started us off with word and excel. It wasn't until undergrad that I was exposed to programming again properly again and realized what logo and that teacher actually was trying to us. I wish subsequent teachers had kept going in that direction.

pradn 4y ago

The great thing about systems like LOGO are that you can even implement them without a computer! A really easy way to get kids excited about programming is having them give LOGO-like instructions to "robots", their classmates, parents, or teachers. There's the extra fun factor of reversing roles of authority in such a setting. I've helped teach CS to high schoolers for a few years. In some years, we've used visual systems like this. In my experience, they help kids get started with programming really easily. They can slowly learn more and more programming concepts with immediate visual feedback. But, in all classes, they get stuck in learning to abstract or plan solutions ahead of time for more complex problems. That's a hard jump with every method of teaching CS, though. In a sense, the immediacy of visual programming can make it hard for them to slowly develop long-range planning and reasoning skills. I'm not sure if a purely symbolic approach is better, still. I do think a bit more practice-oriented learning may help - think multiplication table worksheets.

8ig8 4y ago
Big Traks follow Logo-like programming. I loved mine… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Trak
- dtagames 4y ago
  I almost lost my mind over the idea of a "programmable toy" when Big Trak came out. I loved it but not really programmable enough, right?
  - jazzyjackson 4y ago
    16-command memory, looking it up. Apparently it's pretty easy to drop in an Arduino and go from there! Cool video: https://youtu.be/D-guBA1_T_Y https://youtu.be/D-guBA1_T_Y

johnwalkr 4y ago

I had the same experience. We used logo in elementary school on Apple IIes and I thought we were just "learning computers." Looking back I realize that one teacher went out of her way to teach us something useful with the oudated hardware available (this was in 1992). Other teachers of the same class just let us play around with a print shop program, and in junior high we had a computer class which was just typing practice, again using Apple IIes. They were old and unmaintained, they didn't even have software available -we had to type into the command prompt for 45 minutes. In high school I took a computer science course, but quickly dropped it because it started us off with word and excel. It wasn't until undergrad that I was exposed to programming again properly again and realized what logo and that teacher actually was trying to us. I wish subsequent teachers had kept going in that direction.