And They Were Thinking? Basic, Logo, Personality and Pedagogy - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 117

express Mathematical ideas and make Mathematical concepts concrete, they saw it as
a meta-language in which to express Mathematical thought [1 p5]. They wanted a
“standard, teachable terminology to discuss the heuristic aspects of mathematical
activity concerned with the art of solving problems” (p. 5, their emphasis). Here is the
origin of Papert's often expressed need to teach 'thinking about thinking' [17 p2] and
the decision to write a computer language whose primitives and predicates inherently
contained and expressed the mechanisms of logic and Mathematics. “Do we give
children the instruction 'think!' without even telling them how to think?” (p4, Pa-
pert's emphasis). The mathematical purpose expressed by Feurzeig is actually at odds
with Papert who is at pains to stress the general problem solving capability of the
language [17, 20]. Lisp's origins in Artificial Intelligence were supposed to support
this [21 p14, 22 p16], but no author I have read ever explained how it was to happen.
5 Basic and Logo
Feurzeig's Logo group began with education and worked back to the form of their
language. To create Basic Kemeny and Kurtz began with Computer Science and
found educational uses for it. As someone who has spent forty years shouting at his
education students to always begin with education and bring in computers if they
could be useful I find it painful that Basic was an almost instant educational success
and Logo wasn't.
By 1967 Basic was in use in eighteen secondary schools, eighteen colleges and
universities, government agencies and “some local business concerns” [23 p23, 24
p2]. School use in particular was only limited by the number of available telephone
lines. The reports are full of interesting and advanced programs written by students at
all levels and the enthusiasm of the authors is obvious. (That said, Putnam, Sleeman,
Baxter and Kuspa [25 p22] state “Errors were found with virtually every construct in
all tests and interviews. … students with a semester or more of experience with Basic
had a very fuzzy knowledge of how various constructs operate.”)
By contrast, many of the programs in the Final Report on the Logo Project [1],
seem forced, elementary and repetitive. Many from the primary level, ages 7 to 9, are
examples of programs to reverse the letters in a word, print a set of consecutive num-
bers or simply print strings. The first lessons did not involve writing code at all. This
did not happen until lesson Seven (p. 67). In the secondary curriculum, many essential
elementary functions such as divide and multiply were written by the teachers and
given to the students to try and understand (p. 215), the inference being that they
could not be expected to write these routines themselves. Johnson [26 p201] found
“The position that the programming environments themselves, e.g., Logo mi-
croworlds, would become the school mathematics curriculum has clearly failed to
gain the support of the educational system.” (See also Mayer [27].)
None of this suggests a language easily taken up by beginners and used for their
own purposes. Part of the reason has to be the use, initially, of recursion for all loops,
definite or indefinite. Recursion is, as Papert has said repeatedly, a powerful problem
solving tool [15, 17, 20, 28] and indeed it is. But then, so is calculus. Papert in par-
ticular has always insisted that Logo is designed to encourage experimentation, with
students writing and testing their own creations. Papert worked with Jean Piaget for