And They Were Thinking? Basic, Logo, Personality and Pedagogy - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 113

disciplines of programming itself, or is it to facilitate a more general development in
problem solving and analytical and logical thinking? Are we teaching computing and
its applications, or are we using programming for some wider educational purpose?
Ham [2 p34] believes that, when it comes to the use of IT in education, “even within
the educational policy and research communities, people do not necessarily agree on
the questions which are worth asking.”
I wish to examine the published thoughts of some of the earliest pioneers who
dared to swim in this very complex sea.
2 The Promise
We have learned how to work with the computer in solving a problem, rather
than submitting a problem for machine solution. Kemeney and Kurtz [3 p22]
Even in the new centaury it is easy to find material critical of the use of computers in
schools, from Cuban's 2001 [4] characterisation as being “oversold and underused,”
to Cox (2010) [5 p16] who found “the actual integrated use of IT by the teachers is
much lower than might have been expected from so many sustained national and
international programs.” But even allowing that not all teachers use IT brilliantly, it is
hard understand Munro's [6 p47] criticism that “microcomputers were introduced into
educational institutions with no prior research and with no educational rationale for
their use.” True, they were. When something is new its introduction cannot be based
on research, and the educational rationale must be the belief of the teacher in the
promise the new idea holds. It was the promise the new world of programming held
for all sorts of educational and cognitive advances that attracted the pioneers of edu-
cational programming languages. “Programming,” declared Ershov in 1981 [7 p1] is
“the second literacy.”
Looking back at their a-priori positions on the benefits that writing programs could
bring to their students, one finds a remarkable unity of spirit. Cynically, it could be
argued that in the 1960's, apart from some rather inflexible Computer Assisted In-
struction (CAI), and some (mostly non-interactive) simulations, writing a program
was about the only educational thing you could do with one. But the pioneers, and
particularly those with a hand in writing specialised educational languages, such as
Kemeny, Kurtz, Feurzeig and Papert, were all convinced that great educational advan-
tages would come from programming a digital computer, although often for different
educational and cognitive reasons. Weyer and Cannara [8 p3] put it this way: “If, by a
free interpretation of Church's thesis, any ideas which can be formalised may be
studied concretely via a computer program, then, by learning programming in full
generality, students can learn to construct laboratories to study any ideas they wish to
think about.”
Basic and Logo were both written in the 1960's, were specifically designed for
educational purposes, and are still in widespread use. A fascinating speculation, now
difficult to resolve from material published of the time, is how much the designers
were influenced by their educational philosophy, and how much by the educational
environment in which they happened to be, and the available tools. Feurzeig and Pa-
pert, operating in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford, the home of Lisp,