And They Were Thinking? Basic, Logo, Personality and Pedagogy - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 114

not only had an example of a language congruent with their educational ideas, but one
in which their new language could be written. Kemeny and Kurtz had two very small
computers from which they hoped to assemble a useful system, neither of which had
so much as an operating system.
The decade that produced the first educational computer languages is now 50 years
in the past. With the singular exception of anything written by Seymour Papert, look-
ing back through the papers and reports leaves a distinct impression of teachers striv-
ing: striving towards goals imperfectly grasped, using computing equipment barely up
to the task and hampered by primitive translators, operating systems and input/output
devices. (Papert knew what he was doing from the outset.) Yet the overall feeling is
of high optimism, more positive than one finds across the literature in 2010. The pio-
neers knew that programming a computer had educational benefits, and were going to
set about proving it to the world.

3 Basic

Our goal was to provide our user community with friendly access to the
computer. Kemeny and Kurtz [9 p534]

Seymour Papert always complained that besides being a poor language, Basic had
been left for the academic community “to pick up, like cast-off clothing” [10]. There
is some weight to this, for Kemeny and Kurtz, Basic's authors, do concentrate in their
publications on Basic as Computer Science and do not say much on its pedagogical or
curricular aspects. Their Final Report to the Course Content Improvement Program of
the National Science Foundation, who financed it, is titled “The Dartmouth Time
Sharing System” [3] rather than something suggesting educational advance. It gives
the reasons for teaching programming to college and secondary students as:

• The need for more people to learn to program because of the key roles com-

puters play in “'business, industry, government and all forms of research.”

• To change the attitude “of the typically intelligent person towards com-

puters,” which they characterised as “a mixture of fear and superstitious
awe.” (One wonders how much has changed!)

To put “the computer at the fingertips of the Faculty.” [3 p1]
There is little here to explain just why writing a program might be educationally ad-
vantageous. They simply state “the hard question was not 'whether' but 'how'” [9
p518]. They do give many examples of programs written by students across a range of
disciplines, but leave it largely to the reader to decide on the cognitive benefits that
accrue. Significantly, they did find that in a programming environment, students were
more likely to share ideas [3 p16]. They also characterise computers as “a magnificent
means of recreation,” (p. 8) something which in 2010 threatens to overshadow their
significance for learning.
Kemeny and Kurtz strongly distinguish between using computers for instruction
and having students write their own programs. While they saw the possibilities of
CAI, and even thought “they ought to do more,” they saw much more potential when
“the student is the teacher and the machine learns” [3 p11], noting that “by being able

•