Teaching the Turtle New Tricks

By Philip Faflick

Schoolchildren find the Logo language a good way to start

At the progressive Lamplighter School in Dallas, the students are hard at work at their computer consoles, their faces intent in the reflected greenish light of the video screens. An eight-year-old types instructions that bring forth on the screen a figure of the space shuttle Columbia, complete with desert landing strip and disposable booster rockets. A nine-year-old pointedly picks apart the logic of one of his teacher's programs. Three-year-olds who cannot yet speak in complete sentences bang away at their keyboards, conjuring up electronic squiggles and squares.

Like thousands of other students across the country, these children are exploiting the advantages of a new electronic-age language called Logo, which in effect allows them to be their own computer programmers.

Most small computers come supplied with a programming language called BASIC, for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. Written in the mid-'60s for Dartmouth College students, BASIC assumes a working knowledge of algebra and some technical computer jargon as well. Logo, by contrast, was created with grade-school children in mind. To keep things very, very simple for the user, Logo starts off with a handful of English words that the computer recognizes as commands to make it do things. The word PLAY, for instance, tells a properly equipped computer to play a musical note. Another command, SENTENCE, instructs it to put two words together into a sentence. Still more commands direct the movement of a tiny triangular character called the turtle, which crawls across the screen leaving a trace of where it has been. Typing in, say, RIGHT 90, turns the turtle 90DEG to the right. FORWARD 50 sends it sliding forward about 50 mm. Sitting down at a Logo computer, eight-year-olds can start getting simple results almost immediately. They can also put commands together, like building blocks, to teach the turtle new tricks. With skillful supervision they will be writing their own programs before the first hour is up (see box).

"Logo's immediate result is it establishes a good first impression," says Seymour Papert, 59, the gray-bearded, South African-born M.I.T. mathematician whose theoretical work in the arcane field of artificial intelligence led to Logo. "It convinces the child that he can master the machine. It lets him say, 'I'm the boss.' " Says Dr. Sylvia Weir, a pediatrician who works with the Educational Computing Group at M.I.T: "People have usually considered the stupid thing in the classroom the child. Now the stupid thing, as it were, is the computer. And the child is the teacher." Giving children this kind of control can sometimes have dramatic effects. In an experimental program at the Getting School for Handicapped Children in Boston, one 17-year-old suffering from cerebral palsy who could barely hold a pencil, much less write coherent English sentences, blossomed during 2 1/2 years of Logo instruction. He now writes papers at the college freshman level and majors in computer science at the University of Massachusetts.

The genesis of Logo, whose name comes from the Greek for "word" or "speech," dates back to the late '60s, when Papert, a confrere of the renowned Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, approached the National Science Foundation with the idea of creating a computer language accessible even to three-year-olds but powerful enough to satisfy the most demanding programmer. "A lot of what I do goes back to Piaget," says Papert. "It was from him that I learned two things about children -- how much kids could learn and how easily they could be taught, their sheer joy in learning. Computers are thinking tools, and children are starved for thinking tools."

The trick to Logo as a thinking tool is that it hides its complexity behind a fac,ade of seeming simplicity. To achieve this capability requires prodigious amounts of computer memory, and it was not until the invention of the micro processor and the mass production of in expensive computer memory chips that Logo could be loaded into the tabletop computers so popular today. Last year Texas Instruments introduced a version of Logo for their $300 home computer. This year three other firms began selling Logo interpreters for the popular Apple II. One of these, Apple's own Logo, has sold some 10,000 copies at $175 each since it became available last March, making it one of Apple's three top-selling software packages. Texas Instruments, which has backed its Logo package with a huge publicity drive, is selling home computers this year at twice last year's sales. Now other manufacturers are eager to follow suit. Versions of Logo are quickly being developed for Atari and Radio Shack home computers.

Logo has not won over everybody. Last month a conference of school computer experts in Tampa broke out in spirited debate over the language's pedagogical merits. "It makes beautiful graphics," concedes Dale Brushwood of the Orange County school board, "but I'm not convinced it's not just a gimmick." Says Dennis Hart of Chicago's board of education: "Our graduates can't get jobs writing programs in Logo."

But Logo's strongest selling point may be its ability to sell itself, especially to children. At Manhattan's J.H.S. 118, two dozen teen-agers crowd around the 14 microcomputers that line the walls of Room 519 for a chance to create their own turtle patterns. "It doesn't really matter what you want it to do," explains Roberto Deleon, 14, watching a fellow ninth-grader create a smiling face on the screen, "as long as you get to know the computer." More and more schoolchildren will. By the end of the year, industry sources estimate, about a quarter of a million students will be using Logo in school districts and private schools in Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Oregon and California.

-- By Philip Faflick. Reported by Lianne Hart/Houston and Peter Stoler /Boston

With reporting by Lianne Hart/Houston and Peter Stoler /Boston

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