[seul-edu] Re: Language advocacy (Logo)

[Robert Rickenbrode II <rkr_ii@yahoo.com>]

I've been involved with a summer program on a native american reservation 
for 7 years now that splits it time between Logo instruction and 
traditional craft instruction. We teach the students enough computer 
programming (varies by student) that they eventually do a "blueprint" of 
the design of the craft they are working on in the craft session, following 
good program design.  See http://www.math.utah.edu/~clemens/relearning.html 
for more details.

Granted, this is an example of moving turtles around, but it works in our 
context because it makes a concrete link between the "old" and "new" 
technologies and thus both educational  "sides" benefit through this synergy.

However, we get to some really fundamental mathematical concepts during the 
program, since one of the founders is an analytical geometer from the 
University of Utah with a keen interest in math education, including: the 
geometric concepts of rotation, translation, reflection, and magnification; 
cartesian coordinates (!); the pythagorean theorem; various polygons (and 
their properties); circles; interior/exterior angles; and so on.

Along the way, the students get a good introduction to procedural 
programming and to their traditional culture.

What you can do graphically with Logo varies from distribution to 
distribution. I wrote a simple paint program 6 years ago in the version we 
used. It's also somewhat trivial to do 2D animation in logo also.

I would spend some time looking at logo sites before making a decision. 
Look particularly here - 
http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/logo-foundation/ , the Logo Foundation. 
One of the big benefits about choosing logo is that there are enormous 
educational resources available online based on the language.

[To balance things out - I'm considering python for a large scale project 
I'm working on and am learning Zope...]


Robert K. Rickenbrode II
rkr_ii@yahoo.com