Newsgroups: comp.lang.logo Path: news.media.mit.edu!grapevine.lcs.mit.edu!olivea!sgigate.sgi.com!sgiblab!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!harlequin.com!tim From: tim@harlequin.com (Tim McNerney) Subject: Re: Evolution of logo In-Reply-To: kerrb@magill.unisa.edu.au's message of 24 Dec 93 19:43:31 +1030 Message-ID: Lines: 31 Sender: usenet@harlequin.com (Usenet Maintainer) Nntp-Posting-Host: lantra.harlequin.com Organization: Harlequin Inc, Cambridge, MA References: <1993Dec24.194331.91@magill.unisa.edu.au> Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1993 01:02:44 GMT In article <1993Dec24.194331.91@magill.unisa.edu.au> 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)... I agree with this (so far). ...that needs to be learnt in a formal, counter-intuitive manner?? But, with all due respects, I do not agree that this is necessarily so. This is not to say that teaching recursion is as easy as teaching basic turtle graphics. I speculate that, with the proper visualization tools, some types of list processing (and maybe even recursion) would be easier to teach. Over ten years ago some experiments were conducted at Brown University to see if improvements in user interfaces combined with a Pascal simulator which graphically displayed data structures made it easier for college students to learn about programming and computer science. I never followed up on the results, but I imagine that better visualization and debugging tools do indeed make it easier to teach programming. This leaves me with some (perhaps naive) questions: . Have there been similar studies exploring the benefits of a "Visual" Logo? . Has anyone experimented with classroom aids ("props") to demonstrate list operations? --Tim