🚀 go-pugleaf

Brian,

Let me address a few of your comments.

In article <15l2tiINNkec@agate.berkeley.edu>, bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) writes:
> Hi, Ken.
> 
> But I'm not convinced that technical progress is the most important thing
> we need right now.

Kill no threads before their time.  I think this is a healthy topic for
discussion even if it may not be on the top of everyone's agenda.

> For one thing, even the existing Logo has technical capabilities that are
> hardly ever used.

This is curious.  The same could be said of any complex system.

> (Of course people should work on technical things; I'm
> not trying to argue against that.  Just that I don't think it's the most
> important thing to worry about.)  It doesn't seem to me that technical
> limitations are mainly what's standing in the way of education reform via
> Logo (or in general).

Agreed.  However, advances in computer technology have been made, and if we
don't think carefully about how we want to bring this technology to children,
someone else with a whole lot of money will, and the choices they make may not
be the choices you or I would make.  If you truly want to be an instrument of
educational reform, you must be aware of what is happening in the world around
you.

> There is by now a pretty substantial literature about
> using Logo at the high school level (such as the MIT Press books I listed
> a few messages ago), but they're not exactly best sellers.  Most of the
> Logo work in practice is still along the square-triangle-house lines.

But perhaps a language whose design brings the user one step further from the
way machines do things and one step closer to the way they work in the "real
world" would encourage the user to do more sophisticated things.  Keep in mind
that many recent technical advances provide programmers with simpler, more
natural models of real-world systems.  Object-oriented technology is a prime
example.  A child can more readily grasp a scene as being made of actors which
"act" on each other than as a collection of subprocedures which "call" each
other.  Very simple designs like the "square-triangle-house" are easy to
describe procedurally, but complex scenes which model the real world need the
power of object-oriented design in order to be grasped by children.

> Another thing is that even the Logo community has backed away from the
> radical critique of the institution of schooling that we started with
> in the 60s.  Everyone now talks about "integrating Logo into the
> curriculum."  In other words, use Logo to do the same stuff you would
> have done anyway, what your principal wants you to do.

Amen to that.  Again, I feel that keeping abreast of technology will help those
of us who are dedicated to educational reform to prove to the world that there
is a more humane route to education.  My advice is to ignore those people who
have already made up their minds not to try something new and concentrate on
those who are open to change.  Show them that we can take the best advances in
computer science and make them comprehendable to children.  Blow their socks
off!  Blow their minds!

> By the way, I'm skeptical about "visual programming" if you mean something
> along the lines of Pinball Construction Kit or Hypercard.  I think that
> that sort of thing achieves slickness at the expense of intellectual depth.
> That sounds pretty abstract; I guess I mean that you don't learn to think
> like a hacker (like a problem-solver, if you prefer) from pushing icons
> around.

Just because its been done poorly so far doesn't mean it is not worth doing. 
Don't be so quick to throw this one out.  People laughed at GUI's (graphical
user interfaces) which were based on the premise that people could work better
with images than just text alone, but they took the world by storm.

Think of poetry.  My best english teachers warned me that just because a poem
is incomprehensible does not mean that it is "deep".  The reverse is true, just
because "visual programming" is simple does not mean it is "shallow".  (Really!
I wouldn't have thought I'd ever hear this kind of argument coming from a Logo
user :-) ).

Ben.
---
Ben Armstrong, Software Development                  bus: (902)422-1973
Dymaxion Research Ltd.,                              fax: (902)421-1267
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada B3J 1R2            Internet: bg@dymaxion.ns.ca