Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
There's more than one way to do things
 
PerlMonks  

LOGO is a good idea

by Fuzzy Frog (Sexton)
on May 26, 2004 at 20:57 UTC ( [id://356730]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: Re: Teaching Perl to Children
in thread Teaching Perl to Children

LOGO is a bit of a special case. The language was specifically designed for teaching young children how to program computers. In fact, I suggest that the OP consider teaching his child some LOGO before moving to Perl. It has several traits that make it an almost ideal learning language:

-- The immediate visual feedback provided by the turtle's movements make LOGO programs more concrete than most programming languages. A diagram on a screen is much more staisfying (to me, anyway) than a line or two of text. Even if the text says "Hello, World!"

-- It has a Lisp-like "functional" structure which makes building a program out of re-usable pieces easy and natural.

-- It makes math, particularly geometry, relevent and therefore interesting. Indeed, teaching mathematical concepts through programmuing was one of the design goals.

I had instruction in LOGO for a few hours a week from 4th through 6th grade. I loved it, and I think it's a much more worthwhile use of computer time in school than word processing or (God forbid) typing lessons. There are free LOGO interpreters for just about every PC operating system in existence, and there are several excellent books for teachers. Unfortunately, very few elementry teachers seem to have heard of it, and even fewer feel competent to teach it.* LOGO deserves to be far better known than it now is.

_____________
-- Fuzzy Frog

*based on a limitted sample of personal conversations.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: LOGO is a good idea
by hardburn (Abbot) on May 26, 2004 at 21:03 UTC

    I grew up with BASIC on an Apple //c, but there was a LOGO tutorial on one of the disks. It didn't get too deep, and I never found a way to get at a full-fledged interpreter that was useful outside the tutorial. My third-grade math course did actually spend a few weeks on LOGO.

    Some day, I'll have to see about making a Mindstorms robot that is sent the compiled output from a LOGO program to draw on a real piece of paper, just like the old Tortise machines.

    ----
    send money to your kernel via the boot loader.. This and more wisdom available from Markov Hardburn.

      LOGO for LEGOs! Written in Perl, of course. ;-)

      -Theo-
      (so many nodes and so little time ... )

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://356730]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others avoiding work at the Monastery: (5)
As of 2024-03-29 00:03 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found