Read the Daily Papert

These Logo activity books, help sheets, and projects are a collection of material I have used in teacher training courses, both primary and secondary, as well as with primary and secondary school students.

The collection has been slowly growing as I've added new stuff from time to time and rewritten materials to make them clearer or more interesting.

I'd like to get across that:

1. programming is a powerful intellectual tool for thinking;
2. it is accessible to the very youngest learners;
3. it can be as challenging as you like; and
4. if you like this kind of thing it's fun, usually hard fun, the best kind!

(Click here for the 'curriculum-speak' version)

Logo never fails to please me and quite often at least some of my students. It doesn't grab everyone completely, but at first almsot all students enjoy themselves drawing shapes in bright colours, making exciting patterns, and using numbers to make things larger, smaller, faster.

Logo affords a combination of structure and playful, exploratory thinking which in turn can produce good holding power. It is a constructionist approach that treats programming more as a process of experimental building, in a similar way to any craft. But it can be demanding of one's time to learn to any effect.

For a longer discussion about the pedagogy of Logo see here.

A list of links from my del.icio.us is here.

An old but quite interesting bibliography is here. And an old bibliography of some of Papert's works is here. Both these lists need updating and were created some time ago.

Some sources for the early projects:

List of MIT Logo Memos by Andru Luvisi

There's the DSpace repository where a lot of this stuff is archived.

And the MIT AI Lab archive - searchable here

The Edinburgh Logo Project crica 1980 was an important Logo project for the UK. It was run with RM and Terak by Peter Ross and Ken Johnson. No archive yet but see reference here about halfway down page.

That project followed on from the earlier research at Edinburgh Dept of AI during the 1970s under J. Howe. Here's a documentary archive being put together by Graham Toal (Edinburgh Alumnus)