And They Were Thinking? Basic, Logo, Personality and Pedagogy - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 112

And They Were Thinking? Basic, Logo, Personality
and Pedagogy
John S. Murnane
The ICT in Education and Research Group
The University of Melbourne, Australia
[e-mail]
Abstract. This paper is concerned with some limited aspects of the history of
two programming languages purpose-designed for students learning to program
digital computers: Basic and Logo. The focus is the very different educational
aims and philosophies of the originators of these languages. They are compared
and their early use in schools sketched. While the reasons for teaching students
to write programs were initially based on experience in programming digital
computers for non-educational use, despite extensive research and publications,
it would seem that the teacher of today is not in a much better position to justify
teaching programming than the original pioneers.
Keywords: Computer education; introductory programming languages; history
of computing.
1 Introduction
The introduction of yet another language clearly deserves critical examination.
Feurzeig, Papert, Bollm, Grant, and Solomon [1 p12]
This paper is concerned with the history of programming languages purpose-designed
for students learning to program digital computers. A proper treatment of this topic
would run to a small library and deal with the ideas and intent behind the form of the
language, research on its success in educational use, examples of classroom use and
modifications made as a result of experience, so stringent selection was necessary. My
main interest is in the intent of the creators the languages, so I began with the idea of
examining the educational concepts behind the development of several of them, but in
the end found space for only two, Basic and Logo, and then in a very constrained form.
The creation of a programming language of any sort is a complex business and the
province of a special elite in the world of programming. Yet the difficulty of the crea-
tion of a language for fields such as business or mathematics for which there is an
existing set of well tried models, pales into insignificance compared to the task of
creating one for educational purposes: a space where a choice must first be made
between various pedagogies, all with their own built-in advantages and disadvantages,
advocates and detractors, before even the form of the language is decided on. Nor will
the educational aim be simple. Is it to be a language to introduce the forms and