Logo

Logo use in my classes

I have found that Logo and Logo like projects always work in my class.

There is something very satisfying about controlling a turtle and giving it commands and making it draw pretty patterns on the screen.

I have used Logo so many times, sometimes introducing it to the class by asking a human robot (student volunteer) to come up and giving him/her commands, sometimes by just asking the students to experiment with a little bit of code that I give them and asking them to turn it into a square and then a hexagon and finally a circle! I have tried it in many ways. It always works.

Very quickly after a Logo project starts, my students start shouting out

'I made a square'

'I made a hexagon!'.

'What angle did you use?

'Look at mine, it is repeating 1000000 times'.

'Well mine is just doing it forever.'

'Cool'

'Mrs V, come see mine'

Students get up and run over excitedly to tell others to see theirs or copy the angles and repeat numbers to make one just as nice as someone else's...They love it !

Thank you Seymour Papert and everyone on the Logo team for creating the perfect playground to play with math and learn about how we learn.

Seymour Papert's first year long programming class was in 1969 with 7th graders using the Logo programming language to control a turtle (both a physical one and the one on a screen). Papert’s 1980 book, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas set off a revolution in the use of Logo in schools.