Past and Future Turtles: The Evolution of the Logo Programming Language (Part 1)

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is a marvelous book coauthored by one of the SICP coauthors. In contrast to SICP its focus is on math more than programming, and it aims at exploring math more than covering a curriculum for a course.

In Logo's heyday there were several other fine Logo books -- like Brian Harvey's Computer Science Logo Style, and one whose title I'm forgetting, by several authors, billing itself as for a particular Logo implementation but with lots of rather interesting projects like a basic proof assistant.

Lots of great ideas in there! Thanks for the link!

Somewhat similar but in the browser - which is useful if you are trying to teach a bunch of kids on a smorgasbord of Macs, Chromebooks, Windows machines.

https://hourofpython.trinket.io/a-visual-introduction-to-pyt...

Having access to a language with a turtle is nice, but Python really is not the same thing as Logo.

Logo is a small, simple, and powerful language. It has simple syntax and a small number of concepts, making it easy to learn.

Python is a large, hairy scripting language that is currently an in-vogue way to glue together performant C libraries and get work done. Python can be useful, but I do not think it is nearly as well suited to education as Logo is.

Could you please elaborate on your game idea? I'm wanting to do something similar, but I haven't quite found anything that I'm happy with, and I'd love to hear what you had in mind, if you were willing to share...

I started with their LOGO on Apple ][s back on the early 80s. I reached out to them a while back to let them know the impact they had on my career.