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From: matt@volga.EECS.Berkeley.EDU (Matt Wright)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.logo
Subject: Re: Evolution of logo
Date: 27 Dec 1993 08:19:46 GMT
Organization: University of California, at Berkeley
Lines: 39
Message-ID: <2fm5r2$hdr@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <1993Dec24.194331.91@magill.unisa.edu.au>
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kerrb@magill.unisa.edu.au writes:
>Is this fair comment?
>The designers of logo have grafted an intuitive learning environment (the body
>language of the turtle) onto a core (LISP LIST processing) that needs to be
>learnt in a formal, counter-intuitive manner??
>
>This question differs slightly from my previous one that was (helpfully)
>interpreted by Brian as ...
>turtle graphics=easy=intuitive VERSUS lists=hard=formal

Brian (and others, maybe) already defused this dichotomy a little, but I'd
like to break it down a little more.  First of all, turtle graphics can be
very formal!  There are 360 degrees in a circle, distances are the same
anywhere on the screen, etc., etc.  Those turtle graphics were put there to
teach geometry, which is very formal.

The other thing is that list processing doesn't need to be learned in a
formal, counter-intuitive manner.  My favorite way to introduce students to
list processing is to give them a list of things to type to the computer,
and have them guess what result each one will produce.  Of course, at the
beginning, they have no idea, so they can't guess, but then the second thing
is similar to the first, and so on.  This is just to learn what the
primitive list-manipulating procedures, like FIRST, BF, SE, FPUT, etc., do,
but the approach is very informal and relies on the students getting an
intuition.  (It's also more fun than listning to a lecture, and it seems to
be pretty effective.)

Now, I wouldn't want to try to teach recursion this way, but I would hope to
mix in the informal and the intuitive along with the more rigorous,
mathematical type stuff.

To me, the question isn't "which topics are formal and which are
intuitive?", but "at this point, for this student, for this topic, which
approach should I use right now?"  Everything that I understand well about
computer science I understand both on a formal level and on an informal
level, and I think teachers should be able to (eventually) expect the same
thing of their students.

-Matt