You may be of the impression that technology in education is a recent phenomenon. You may also be surprised to learn that we have reached the 40th birthday of LOGO. If you don’t know what LOGO is, you must also be a digital native – one of those folks who assumes he/she is a natural user without really experiencing the changes that have brought us to the point where we are today. The origin of LOGO was a little before my time as an active computer user, but I did have experience with LOGO as an educational application.
So, for you Web 2.0 digital newbies, I dug a few LOGO images out of the vault. LOGO was a very capable language that was typically used at a very simple level to allow students to experience a “computational” perspective on geometry and learn some fundamental programming skills.
A program/script might look something like this (after defining square):
TO BLACKHOLE :SIDE
SQUARE :SIDE
RT 12
Make “SIDE :SIDE*.985
IF :SIDE.5 [STOP]
BLACKHOLE :SIDE
END
Time for this old man’s afternoon power nap. 😉
