4 ms·

There is a fairly recent (2020) article on the history of Logo, written by Cynthia Solomon (one of the original designers of Logo), Brian Harvey (UCBLogo, Snap!

There is a fairly recent (2020) article on the history of Logo, written by Cynthia Solomon (one of the original designers of Logo), Brian Harvey (UCBLogo, Snap!) and some other people: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386329 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386329 (click on the PDF button to read it) It is quite long, well written and shares some personal anecdotes, so I really recommend it for anyone interested in the history of the language and its influence.

larsbrinkhoff 3y ago
I wonder if they were aware Patrick Suppes' group at Stanford was doing Logo already in the 1960s. They used Imlacs for turtle graphics, the very same Douglas Hofstadter used to edit his manuscript for "Gödel, Escher, Bach".
- OhMeadhbh 3y ago
  From what I read, Bitzer (PLATO), Papert/Solomon (LOGO) and Suppes (EPGY and Stanford) were all familiar with each other, thought each had different approaches (and if Mark Guzdial @ GIT is to believed (and he probably should be), different models for education.) I know PLATO received extensive funding from the ARMY early on while Suppe's pre-EPGY projects got more funding from the NSF. My mom's research at MIT was funded by the Air Force, but was adjacent to the LOGO team (not directly part of it.) Having talked extensively with Solomon and slightly with Suppes and Bitzer, I believe their funding sources extensively influenced the direction of their research. Hofstadter is probably a good adjunct to any discussion re: LOGO. You could easily believe "Hofstadter's Butterfly" is just a random work of modernist art if you didn't know the science behind it. Pretty much the same with a lot of Artemis Papert's turtle art. I bemoan the loss of fractal composition and turtle graphics as a mainstream educational thread. Both embody clear visual consequences of repeated application of procedural thinking. We used to train kids that certain types of art can be linked to procedural thinking, where the abstractions involved were much more on the mathematical side. Now we just tell them "download this python package and these 3d model assets" where the abstractions are muddied and focused on tools rather than the thing the tool makes. We're lucky if kids walk away understanding 3d cartesian space. But I digress...
LVB 3y ago
I like this paper quite a bit. Including photographs (color!) was a wonderful touch.

larsbrinkhoff 3y ago

I wonder if they were aware Patrick Suppes' group at Stanford was doing Logo already in the 1960s. They used Imlacs for turtle graphics, the very same Douglas Hofstadter used to edit his manuscript for "Gödel, Escher, Bach".

OhMeadhbh 3y ago
From what I read, Bitzer (PLATO), Papert/Solomon (LOGO) and Suppes (EPGY and Stanford) were all familiar with each other, thought each had different approaches (and if Mark Guzdial @ GIT is to believed (and he probably should be), different models for education.) I know PLATO received extensive funding from the ARMY early on while Suppe's pre-EPGY projects got more funding from the NSF. My mom's research at MIT was funded by the Air Force, but was adjacent to the LOGO team (not directly part of it.) Having talked extensively with Solomon and slightly with Suppes and Bitzer, I believe their funding sources extensively influenced the direction of their research. Hofstadter is probably a good adjunct to any discussion re: LOGO. You could easily believe "Hofstadter's Butterfly" is just a random work of modernist art if you didn't know the science behind it. Pretty much the same with a lot of Artemis Papert's turtle art. I bemoan the loss of fractal composition and turtle graphics as a mainstream educational thread. Both embody clear visual consequences of repeated application of procedural thinking. We used to train kids that certain types of art can be linked to procedural thinking, where the abstractions involved were much more on the mathematical side. Now we just tell them "download this python package and these 3d model assets" where the abstractions are muddied and focused on tools rather than the thing the tool makes. We're lucky if kids walk away understanding 3d cartesian space. But I digress...

LVB 3y ago

I like this paper quite a bit. Including photographs (color!) was a wonderful touch.