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 90° 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 2½ years of Logo instruction. He now writes papers at the college freshman level and majors in computer science at the University of Massachusetts.