And They Were Thinking? Basic, Logo, Personality and Pedagogy - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 116

he knows he is preparing for a solo flight. He knows, in fact, that he can
eventually exert more influence on his learning than his instructor … com-
puter technology in education should invite similar control at all levels. It
should, in particular, invite the student to 'go behind the scenes' (possibly
acting in concert with teachers) at any time they elect. There should be no
secrets, on one-upmanship of the adult world over the student world.
To go behind the scenes and do your own thing you have to be able to change the
system. In 1971 it meant you had to be able to program. These days with the advent of
Web 2.0 and all sorts of multi-media vehicles it's a bit different, but the principle still
holds, more strongly if anything. diSessa [16 p164] advocates a similar hierarchy.
Papert considered the “proper use …of drill-and-practice programs” was something
for other students to write [17 p4-1]. It's also interesting that Dwyer emphasised, as
his first principle, the essential “social character of human learning,” though I doubt
that in the USA in the 1960's he'd ever heard of Vygotsky.
Despite its attractions, Dartmouth Basic has always been heavily criticized for its
simplicity and the lack of structure and formal rigor of programs written in it. The
first definition of Algol, with its ground-breaking ideas and structure was published in
1958, and an Algol compiler was available at Dartmouth by 1967 [3 p8]. It would
seem that Kemeny and Kurtz's desire for simplicity overruled thoughts of enhanced
Scientific (or Mathematical) precision.
4 Logo
In original conception, Logo was conceived as a form of Lisp suitable for beginners to
write programs in. The 'Lo' in the title suggested 'Logic,' and the earliest versions of
the Logo system were written in Lisp. It is curious then that early papers [1 p1, 18 p1]
make it clear that it was “expressly designed” for the teaching of Mathematics. At that
time there was no Turtle Geometry, and indeed no arithmetic functionality beyond
addition and subtraction. Brown and Rubinstein [19 p3] flatly describe it as
“non-numeric.”
Early Logo was very simple. Like Basic, it came with built-in editing and file
manipulation commands. If these are ignored, the 1971 version consisted of just 26
'operations,' five of which accessed the calendar and clock, and 15 'commands.'
Most operations were concerned with program logic or list manipulation. An essential
part of the design was to produce a language of such simplicity that it forced users to
write their own library of commonly used routines, such as multiplication and divi-
sion. From such a library, complex programs could be built. “Ideally, by the end of
the course, each student would have created his own extended version of Logo” [19
p10]. If you exclude the rich set of mathematical functions, contemporary Basic was
even smaller, but for a different reason: to make the language as easy as possible to
learn. (And remember Basic was designed for the 'non-mathematical.')
There is no mention of the degree of difficulty inherent in learning to program gen-
erally, and certainly not in learning Logo, in Feurzeig's papers. The entire emphasis
in The Final Report [1] is on the difficulty of learning Mathematics , and how Logo
was developed to make that easier. The programming language followed as a result of
a specific educational need. The designers of Logo intended it not only as a vehicle to