5 ms·

LOGO >> Scratch Schools should teach LOGO to grade schoolers. Two birds with one stone. Learn something about computers and learn how to use a keyboard.

susam 3y ago
That indeed used to happen in the 1990s and it had a big impact on my life. We used to get about 30 minutes of computer time twice a month. One of my favourite activities during that time was to try and draw interesting shapes and share the code with my teachers and friends. I remember I was particularly proud of drawing a simple house with an animated dashed border. Since we did not have hard disks yet and floppy disks were very limited in number, our computer teacher helped with quickly transcribing the code from screen onto a paper, so that we don't lose the program I had just written and demonstrated to others. I have written a blog post about my happy little experience with Logo programming, in case anyone wants to read more about it: https://susam.net/blog/fd-100.html https://susam.net/blog/fd-100.html
tehwebguy 3y ago
They did for me, sort of! I was taught LOGO at like 8 years old when, once every couple weeks I think, the kids in “advanced” math or “gifted” program (latter term I only heard in 4th grade, even then it felt cheesy or worse) were bussed to a semi-school to take 2 electives at a time. I also got to take an HTML class there! This would have been approx 30 years ago.
ece 3y ago
I learned LOGO when I was 10 or so, in mid-90s, in India. I had just learned Basic the year before, and it did useful math things, so I was not impressed by LOGO. Off course LOGO does more than what I played around with on the lab computers with (even more than Basic), in a limited amount of time.
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  I wonder where your lessons for BASIC and LOGO came from. I've got to think that there's a wide range of quality in lessons and lesson plans. Or at least some lessons are intended for a certain age group or emphasize one type of skill over another. I'm reminded that when I was taught LOGO in the 70s it was in a class where there was about a 3 to 1 student to teacher ratio and the lessons were far from self-paced. Maybe THAT'S why I have such great memories. It's 'cause I had someone right there to answer questions. And my memories of learning LOGO in the 70s was it was very much like an American Montessori experience. The "teacher" introduced a concept and you got to play around with it for an hour. Then there would be a new concept followed by more play. And as I mentioned, if I found I couldn't do something I wanted to do, the teacher was right there.
  - ece 3y ago
    I don't think I'm too far off in saying my teachers at the time probably weren't experienced with computers. I didn't have a computer at home until a couple years later (and moved to the US), and didn't really learn about data structures and algorithms until a couple more years. I can only remember doing computer labs (with ~20 shared computers, and some individual attention if you had problems) like chemistry or physics labs, with write ups and some theory. It was enough to pique my interest in computers certainly, so age appropriate lesson accomplished I think, relatively speaking.
ModernMech 3y ago
They did and still do. I have a student now who is Greek, and he told me he learned Logo in his school system.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
keyle 3y ago
I'm with you except... For my side I did learn LOGO first in school. My son and daughter, I see they're being told Scratch. Why? Simple, they're learning on iPads, not computers with keyboards. Scratch Jr. has an iPad app where kids can drag and drop the visual programming blocks to do stuff. That's why they go for Scratch and not LOGO anymore. I hope they will teach them LOGO at some point or I will.
- User23 3y ago
  I have mixed thoughts on this. On the one hand it feels obvious that this kind of lobotomized programming experience will be stultifying. On the other hand factorio shows what a gamified interface makes possible and I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be easily adapted for tablets.
  - ece 3y ago
    Mindustry runs on Android and iPad I see.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    > On the one hand it feels obvious that this kind of lobotomized programming experience will be stultifying. As someone who learned to program in Scratch many years ago, don't worry about it. I've written in languages from Python to Assembly, I've worked professionally as a programmer, etc. It's fine. As far as I can tell, the best way to teach someone to program is to enable them to pursue their own projects and to help them when they get stuck before they get so frustrated they give up. (Maybe there are learning styles I'm not aware of, this is true of myself and of people I've met.) When I meet people who want to program but can't (which has happened approximately twice, one of them did come back to programming after a few years & succeeded), it seems to be because they didn't have access to sufficient support, and stupid issues (especially development environment issues) wore them down. Scratch is a tremendous help in both respects. It comes out of the box which cool stuff to do (eg, I made dumb games and animated little movies). It's simple enough for nonprogrammer adults (like teachers) to learn and help debug.
  - DonHopkins 3y ago
DonHopkins 3y ago
Snap! >> Logo >> Scratch Snap! == Scheme ** Scratch Snap! is a blocks based visual programming language like (and inspired by) Scratch, but with the full power of Scheme, an undiluted superset of Logo's and Scratch's capabilities, including user defined blocks, closures, and even continuations! https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu More about Snap!: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309162 >One of the coolest ways to learn programming I've ever seen is the Snap! visual programming language, which is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu >It's the culmination of years of work by Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig and other Smalltalk and education experts. It benefits from their experience and expert understanding about constructionist education, Smalltalk, Scratch, E-Toys, Lisp, Logo, Star Logo, and many other excellent systems. >Snap! takes the best ideas, then freshly and coherently synthesizes them into a visual programming language that kids can use, but is also satisfying to professional programmers, with all the power of Scheme (lexical closures, special forms, macros, continuations, user defined functions and control structures), but deeply integrating and leveraging the web browser and the internet (JavaScript primitives, everything is a first class object, dynamically loaded extensions, etc). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053999 >Snap! has the full power of Scheme (first class functions, user defined blocks, recursion, closures, continuations, JavaScript integration, etc), with a visual block syntax and playful graphical environment with turtle graphics like Scratch. >The following post is a couple years old, but maybe somebody can provide some updates and recent info! >Edit: I should have RTFA first, which is totally up to date, just published in 2020, from the turtle's mouth: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 >Brian Harvey’s Personal Narrative on Snap!: Scheme Disguised as Scratch >In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several universities developing a new kind of introductory computer science course, meant for non-CS majors, to include aspects of the social implications of computing along with the programming content. Scratch wasn’t quite expressive enough to support such a course (it lacked the ability to write recursive functions), soProf. Daniel Garcia and I thought “What’s the smallest change we could make to Scratch to make it usable in our course?” After 20 years teaching Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [Abelson et al.1984], the best computer science text ever written, I knew that the answer to “what’s the smallest change” is generally “add lambda.” I joined forces with German programmer Jens Mönig, who had developed BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an extension to Scratch with custom (user-defined) blocks, including reporters and predicates. [...] Anybody else in Barcelona for Snap!Con this week? Let's meet up and say hi! https://www.snapcon.org/conferences/2023 https://www.snapcon.org/conferences/2023
OhMeadhbh 3y ago
There's a talk out there where Alan Kay talks about how they were evaluating some of the same concepts for Smalltalk that eventually went into Scheme. I think he was mostly talking about lexical scoping for code blocks. In the same talk he called Kiczales' Art of the Meta-Object Protocol the most important computer science book he's read. Which is to say... Smalltalk benefited greatly from digesting the Scheme Papers in the 70s. It's not idiomatic to Smalltalk, but you can sort of do lambdas by defining code blocks independently of classes and applying them to objects. Squeak really came into its own as a Smalltalk when they bolted Morphic onto it. To this day I am still hurt the JavaScript community rejected the power of prototypal inheritance and bolted Java's broken class system onto the side of the language. Which is to say... if you look under the hood of Squeak/Scratch, you'll find LOGO's philosophic descendants. And bits of Lisp that LOGO didn't implement.

susam 3y ago

That indeed used to happen in the 1990s and it had a big impact on my life. We used to get about 30 minutes of computer time twice a month. One of my favourite activities during that time was to try and draw interesting shapes and share the code with my teachers and friends. I remember I was particularly proud of drawing a simple house with an animated dashed border. Since we did not have hard disks yet and floppy disks were very limited in number, our computer teacher helped with quickly transcribing the code from screen onto a paper, so that we don't lose the program I had just written and demonstrated to others. I have written a blog post about my happy little experience with Logo programming, in case anyone wants to read more about it: https://susam.net/blog/fd-100.html https://susam.net/blog/fd-100.html

tehwebguy 3y ago

They did for me, sort of! I was taught LOGO at like 8 years old when, once every couple weeks I think, the kids in “advanced” math or “gifted” program (latter term I only heard in 4th grade, even then it felt cheesy or worse) were bussed to a semi-school to take 2 electives at a time. I also got to take an HTML class there! This would have been approx 30 years ago.

ece 3y ago

I learned LOGO when I was 10 or so, in mid-90s, in India. I had just learned Basic the year before, and it did useful math things, so I was not impressed by LOGO. Off course LOGO does more than what I played around with on the lab computers with (even more than Basic), in a limited amount of time.

retrocryptid 3y ago
I wonder where your lessons for BASIC and LOGO came from. I've got to think that there's a wide range of quality in lessons and lesson plans. Or at least some lessons are intended for a certain age group or emphasize one type of skill over another. I'm reminded that when I was taught LOGO in the 70s it was in a class where there was about a 3 to 1 student to teacher ratio and the lessons were far from self-paced. Maybe THAT'S why I have such great memories. It's 'cause I had someone right there to answer questions. And my memories of learning LOGO in the 70s was it was very much like an American Montessori experience. The "teacher" introduced a concept and you got to play around with it for an hour. Then there would be a new concept followed by more play. And as I mentioned, if I found I couldn't do something I wanted to do, the teacher was right there.
- ece 3y ago
  I don't think I'm too far off in saying my teachers at the time probably weren't experienced with computers. I didn't have a computer at home until a couple years later (and moved to the US), and didn't really learn about data structures and algorithms until a couple more years. I can only remember doing computer labs (with ~20 shared computers, and some individual attention if you had problems) like chemistry or physics labs, with write ups and some theory. It was enough to pique my interest in computers certainly, so age appropriate lesson accomplished I think, relatively speaking.

ModernMech 3y ago

They did and still do. I have a student now who is Greek, and he told me he learned Logo in his school system.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

keyle 3y ago

I'm with you except... For my side I did learn LOGO first in school. My son and daughter, I see they're being told Scratch. Why? Simple, they're learning on iPads, not computers with keyboards. Scratch Jr. has an iPad app where kids can drag and drop the visual programming blocks to do stuff. That's why they go for Scratch and not LOGO anymore. I hope they will teach them LOGO at some point or I will.

User23 3y ago
I have mixed thoughts on this. On the one hand it feels obvious that this kind of lobotomized programming experience will be stultifying. On the other hand factorio shows what a gamified interface makes possible and I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be easily adapted for tablets.
- ece 3y ago
  Mindustry runs on Android and iPad I see.
- maxbond 3y ago
  > On the one hand it feels obvious that this kind of lobotomized programming experience will be stultifying. As someone who learned to program in Scratch many years ago, don't worry about it. I've written in languages from Python to Assembly, I've worked professionally as a programmer, etc. It's fine. As far as I can tell, the best way to teach someone to program is to enable them to pursue their own projects and to help them when they get stuck before they get so frustrated they give up. (Maybe there are learning styles I'm not aware of, this is true of myself and of people I've met.) When I meet people who want to program but can't (which has happened approximately twice, one of them did come back to programming after a few years & succeeded), it seems to be because they didn't have access to sufficient support, and stupid issues (especially development environment issues) wore them down. Scratch is a tremendous help in both respects. It comes out of the box which cool stuff to do (eg, I made dumb games and animated little movies). It's simple enough for nonprogrammer adults (like teachers) to learn and help debug.
- DonHopkins 3y ago

DonHopkins 3y ago

Snap! >> Logo >> Scratch Snap! == Scheme ** Scratch Snap! is a blocks based visual programming language like (and inspired by) Scratch, but with the full power of Scheme, an undiluted superset of Logo's and Scratch's capabilities, including user defined blocks, closures, and even continuations! https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu More about Snap!: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20309162 >One of the coolest ways to learn programming I've ever seen is the Snap! visual programming language, which is written in JavaScript and runs in the browser. https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu >It's the culmination of years of work by Brian Harvey and Jens Mönig and other Smalltalk and education experts. It benefits from their experience and expert understanding about constructionist education, Smalltalk, Scratch, E-Toys, Lisp, Logo, Star Logo, and many other excellent systems. >Snap! takes the best ideas, then freshly and coherently synthesizes them into a visual programming language that kids can use, but is also satisfying to professional programmers, with all the power of Scheme (lexical closures, special forms, macros, continuations, user defined functions and control structures), but deeply integrating and leveraging the web browser and the internet (JavaScript primitives, everything is a first class object, dynamically loaded extensions, etc). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053999 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23053999 >Snap! has the full power of Scheme (first class functions, user defined blocks, recursion, closures, continuations, JavaScript integration, etc), with a visual block syntax and playful graphical environment with turtle graphics like Scratch. >The following post is a couple years old, but maybe somebody can provide some updates and recent info! >Edit: I should have RTFA first, which is totally up to date, just published in 2020, from the turtle's mouth: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1623m1p3 >Brian Harvey’s Personal Narrative on Snap!: Scheme Disguised as Scratch >In 2009, the University of California, Berkeley, was one of several universities developing a new kind of introductory computer science course, meant for non-CS majors, to include aspects of the social implications of computing along with the programming content. Scratch wasn’t quite expressive enough to support such a course (it lacked the ability to write recursive functions), soProf. Daniel Garcia and I thought “What’s the smallest change we could make to Scratch to make it usable in our course?” After 20 years teaching Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [Abelson et al.1984], the best computer science text ever written, I knew that the answer to “what’s the smallest change” is generally “add lambda.” I joined forces with German programmer Jens Mönig, who had developed BYOB (Build Your Own Blocks), an extension to Scratch with custom (user-defined) blocks, including reporters and predicates. [...] Anybody else in Barcelona for Snap!Con this week? Let's meet up and say hi! https://www.snapcon.org/conferences/2023 https://www.snapcon.org/conferences/2023

OhMeadhbh 3y ago

There's a talk out there where Alan Kay talks about how they were evaluating some of the same concepts for Smalltalk that eventually went into Scheme. I think he was mostly talking about lexical scoping for code blocks. In the same talk he called Kiczales' Art of the Meta-Object Protocol the most important computer science book he's read. Which is to say... Smalltalk benefited greatly from digesting the Scheme Papers in the 70s. It's not idiomatic to Smalltalk, but you can sort of do lambdas by defining code blocks independently of classes and applying them to objects. Squeak really came into its own as a Smalltalk when they bolted Morphic onto it. To this day I am still hurt the JavaScript community rejected the power of prototypal inheritance and bolted Java's broken class system onto the side of the language. Which is to say... if you look under the hood of Squeak/Scratch, you'll find LOGO's philosophic descendants. And bits of Lisp that LOGO didn't implement.