I love seeing references to LOGO as it was the first ever programming language I was taught. I was 7 or 8 years old and it was on an 8bit BBC Micro…Ahhh they were the days. *goes misty eyed*

Part of the attraction was that we didn’t even realise that we were learning how to program. As far as we were concerned we were just ‘playing turtle’. We used to compete to see who could come up with the prettiest logo pattern.

Those lessons taught us the basics of logic, geometry and programming and yet we were just fooling around. Wonderful stuff.

Sounds very fun.

Man… I’m in the wrong profession, teaching LOGO would be fun.

@Milos: Well, I’m pretty much sticking to the book for my lecture material and it has a whole huge chapter about programming. They really try to cover a lot material there. The have a whole section on OO, try to explain polymorphism, and then go into logic programing and show snippets of prolog code. It’s actually quite intense, and most of it flies right above their heads. I cut a lot of it out but it is still too technical I believe.

I’m not sure what other instructors do with this thing. Some I think just skip this whole chapter.

I believe that LOGO was originally Bredlau’s idea. Or someone from the department. I found Tortue via the 109 Community on the old Blackboard. I don’t see it in there now – I don’t know what happened to it. But I did like the idea of using it.

My goal would be to give students an impression that programming is actually not all that scary and mysterious as they might have thought.

Keep fighting the good fight. :)

Is this a required part of the course or do you have some freedom to decide what else you want to throw in outside syllabus? While it is certainly valuable in explaining concepts and ideas it might be a bit more than what a typical CMPT 109 student can handle.

We were playing around with LOGO way back in my second year at school :P

Nothing complex… it was being used to teach shapes more than anything, and just for fun, and we never heard anything about the functions more complex than forward/backward/left/right, but we still used it to draw squares and triangles and stuff.