Contemplations

Miss Johnson had been a teacher for more than 20 years. She had taught a variety of subjects to students of different ages and backgrounds, but her favorite subject to teach was computer science. She loved teaching her students about algorithms, programming languages, and how to write code. However, she had always felt that something was missing in her curriculum. She wanted to teach her students more than just how to write code, she wanted to teach them critical thinking skills.

Past and Future Turtles Part One

Past and Future Turtles Part Two

When Seymour Papert originally conceptualized Logo, he envisioned a language that could be used to demonstrate not just how a computer followed instructions, but how a human being followed instructions, especially those of their own making, and how they developed them. As such, the language has never been successfully optimized for computer execution, as any attempts at doing so tend to defeat the purpose of having the language be easily understandable to a lay human, both to read and write it, without complex formatting or syntax rules.

turtleSpaces isn’t just about games or 3D models, it’s also about art. Although generated by a Logo computer program, some of the visuals created by turtleSpaces can be quite striking! Combined with a digital art program such as Filter Forge, the results can be very artistic indeed.

Check out this gallery of turtle art:

This is a continuation of Past and Future Turtles: The Evolution of the Logo Programming Language (Part 1)

So, Logo was the greatest thing that had ever happened to education, and it was going to foster a bright new generation of geniuses who were going to change the world. We just had to get it out there, and Logo would do the rest.

That was the message its creators sent to the world. And people were listening. In particular, computer manufacturers. It was the early 1980s, an era where the price of a personal computer had dropped into the range of affordability for most of the Western market, with computers such as the VIC-20 and the Sinclair ZX81 costing as little as $100, and even those at the higher-end of the market falling below $1000.

When I was a young child, one of my best friends was a turtle.

Not a real turtle, although that would have been fun, but a virtual one. My turtle lived inside of an Apple II, an early 8-bit computer, at my elementary school.

When I first met her, my turtle, she didn’t do much. She just sat there. It didn’t take long for me to realize that in order to get her to do something, I would need to prompt her. To do this, there was a literal prompt on the screen, beckoning me to type something.