Here’s an episode on languages: APL, Basic, Cobol and Logo. (On PET, TRS-80, Apple II and TI 99/4A, I think…)
Nice to recognise the machine code as 6502!
Also available at the internet archive.
via
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Nice – I miss those educational animations.
Logo is the language that I consider least suited to its task. I can’t believe the authors thought it was suitable for teaching.
BASIC may not have been structured, but it was far easier to understand.
I’m reminded of something I read about APL - it’s very easy to learn if it’s your first language, much more difficult otherwise.
In this case, what one would want is some experimental results as to the usefulness of Logo in teaching. I’m not sure if there are any, but it’s clear there are still adherents of constructionist methods in teaching.
I have at a superficial level studied Piaget, and I have a copy of and have read Mindstorms. But none of that is objective experimental evidence one way or the other. Anyhow, this might be of interest:
Logo and Learning (MIT)
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Given, what respect Alan Kay payed to Piaget and Jerome Bruner, this may be a fair reference.
Compare Alan Kay’s reading list: squeakland : resources : books : reading list
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Logo was part of Papert’s Constructionism philosophy, which builds on Piaget’s Constructivism but is not the same thing like a lot of people think.
Piaget’s idea was that each person constructs their own knowledge by adding to what they already know. In a sense you can’t teach people, but you can help them learn. You have to know what each student already knows in order to give them the material they need to build on top of that.
Papert’s idea was that you can’t know what is inside the student’s head, but if the student tries to build an object in the external world then you can observe that and guess at the student’s current knowledge. It could be a garden, some gears or a model car. But one thing that is particularly good at revealing what is in a student’s head is if they try to write a computer program. So Logo is just one way to help education (specially if we want students to think about thinking and to learn about learning) and not an end in itself (it certainly isn’t a step towards training future professional programmers).
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