From: smith@sctc.com (Rick Smith)
Subject: Re: Beginning Logo lesson plans/project ideas?
Organization: SCTC
Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1992 13:47:40 GMT

I've been carrying on a hunt for books on teaching LOGO in grade
school. My daughter is turning 8 and we're trying to explore LOGO
together.  So I was interested when led11@ccc.amdahl.com (Lynn
Robinson) wrote:

>  I am fairly new to Logo and have bought and borrowed a few books on 
>the subject which I have been skimming for interesting ideas for beginners. 
>Thus far, however, I haven't been that successful in finding good ones 
>(although I've recently acquired Dan Watt's book and another book called 
>'Nudges' which looks a little better than some of the other books I've
>seen).

Is this a book about LOGO programming for grade school kids?  Could
you post the name and/or author and/or publisher and/or ISBN of that
book?

>  Some of the 6th graders seem to have been "taught" Logo (in a 
>very un-Piagetian manner) for almost a year, although they only used it for
>at most 45 minutes per week.  I was not very impressed with the book they 
>had been using, since it contained a series of worksheets that told the
>children pretty much exactly what to type, after which the children
>were told to draw what appeared on the screen.  

Could you post the name and/or author and/or publisher and/or ISBN of
that book? Worksheets would at least provide a starting point for us.
I'm mostly looking for a little bit of lesson structure from which I
can present some programming concepts to my daughter. From that we
might be able to come up with our own things to do.

Is there a good book about "Piagetian" approaches to teaching LOGO? I
vaguely remember reading some stuff about that years ago, but I don't
remember the details any more.

>It seemed that many
>of the kids would follow these lessons in a fairly mindless way, and
>weren't encouraged to think about what they were doing or to 
>be creative.  [further comments omitted]

I hear you saying that you need to jump the gap between rote learning
repetition and problem solving. And you're stuck with old equipment.

One approach might be to find a way to make etch-a-sketch style
drawing interesting to the kids. Maybe have a design class where kids
try to compose "icons" that they can draw with turtle commands. Maybe
start with graphic symbols the kids have on their clothes or on
posters in the classroom.  Maybe start the class with some examples
of sketch icons in familiar art and graphic design (commercial logos,
or even some of that Picasso Don Quixote if you want to get cultural).

You might want to limit them to specific angles (30 degree increments,
45 degree increments, something like that) just to simplify the task.
After all, how many people in general know that an equalateral
triangle involves equal sides and 60 degree turns, much less random
"disadvantaged" kids. I think drawing "a triangle" is actually a hard
thing to do correctly in turtle graphics, unless you've had a decent
amount of geometry.

Once they're writing procedures to draw their icons they can work on
drawing pictures or murals that use the icons as "rubber stamp" design
elements. If you eventually want to get fancy, some of the icons can
be rewritten to have scale factors so they can change their size.

If you minimize the interdependencies between procedures so that the
only interactions are ones the kids _see_ on the screen, maybe they'll
get the idea quicker. AFter all, it's a bug if an icon appears in the
"wrong" place in their picture, and they should (with practice) be
able to figure out how to put things in the places they want.

Just my two cents.

Rick.
smith@sctc.com          arden hills, minnesota
Newsgroups: comp.lang.logo