🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm glad you explained more fully what you meant by "lesson plans"; after
raeding the subject line I almost skipped the message!  :-)

Anyway, your kids are younger than the ones I've taught, so I'm not sure
how good my intuitions will be, but I'll give it a shot.  In light of their
bad prior experience, it might be a good idea to look for projects that
really break the mold of square-triangle-house:

	See how fast you can fill the screen solid with ink.

	Try typing wrong things on purpose and see how many different
	kinds of error messages you can collect.

	I've changed the meaning of one of the primitive Logo commands
	[by setting REDEFP]; figure out which one, figure out how I
	changed it, and figure out how to accomplish what it used to do.

Maybe you could have them work in groups, and be sure that each real
beginner is paired with a more experienced kid.

That's all that strikes me offhand...

In article <favI02.c20F=01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com>, led11@ccc.amdahl.com (Lynn Robinson) writes:
> 
> 
>   Hi, I have just started to volunteer in the computer lab in an inner-city 
> elementary school, and my self-assigned task is to compile some good lesson 
> plans using Logo for 5th and 6th graders.  If anyone out there has created
> or used any lessons plans that worked really well for beginners (kids 
> with < 1 year of Logo), has these plans on-line, and would like to
> share them, I would greatly appreciate it. 
> 
One of the problems of Logo is that students get bored quickly with drawing all 
the similar things as you said about polygons. The reason I guess is that they
do not see the mathematics behind what they are doing.
Logo can and should be used as a medium to explore mathematics.

One idea is that the lt and rt refers to external angles but the angles are not
shown. I am exploring the use of a different ways of showing angles, ie marking
them with arms and small arcs. Will this approach improve learning of angles?
I am not sure, this is an idea I hope to test out soon.

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

If you're interested in geometric constructions that aren't square-triangle-
house you might look for the book

	Visual Modeling with Logo
	James Clayson, MIT Press, 1988

It's not written for young kids -- Clayson teaches a college course from it --
but it's full of good ideas that a parent or teacher could use as starting
points for work you do with your kid(s).

In article <18l195INNqvs@agate.berkeley.edu> bh@anarres.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Brian Harvey) writes:
>
>If you're interested in geometric constructions that aren't square-triangle-
>house you might look for the book
>
>	Visual Modeling with Logo
>	James Clayson, MIT Press, 1988
>
>It's not written for young kids -- Clayson teaches a college course from it --
>but it's full of good ideas that a parent or teacher could use as starting
>points for work you do with your kid(s).

I heartily second the recommendation for this book. It's a gold mine that
I've used for ideas for working with both middle school and elementary school
age kids (the latter my own). The author is an artist, at I've winced
once or twice over some science/math nasties--e.g., one college student
wanting to draw lunar phases goes on about lunar phases being caused by
the Earth's shadow on the moon, when in fact only lunar eclipses are caused
that way, if he were to go out & actually LOOK at a setting sun & a closely
following, waxing crescent moon he'd see where the shadow comes from--
but the book has such good visual ideas that I won't complain.

Following up on the earlier post about the boredom of drawing
rectangle/triangle houses, etc., another variation that's interesting
is replacing 'fd' with more elaborate variations that get the turtle
from where it's at to where 'fd' would send it, but by following a more
circuitous route. You can use such procedures anywhere you'd use fd.
You can segue into fractals using this. For example, change a triangle

to tri :length
repeat 3 [fd :length rt 120]
end

into a Koch curve (snowflake)

to snow :distance :limit
repeat 3 [snowside :distance :limit rt 120]
end

Where 'snowside' has replaced 'fd'. In this example 'snowside' is not an
exact replacement for 'fd', since it takes both distance & limit parameters.
Parameters for the 'fd' substitutes will depend on how you want to mutate
the 'fd' notion. Here's snowside:

to snowside :distance :limit
if or lessp :distance :limit equalp :distance :limit [fd :distance stop]
snowside :distance / 3 :limit
lt 60
snowside :distance / 3 :limit
rt 120
snowside :distance / 3 :limit
lt 60
snowside :distance / 3 :limit
end

You have to know a little about equilateral triangles for this to
make sense. The fd-substitutes have to make exact turtle trips--
here the lt's & rt's cancel out. If such an fd-substitute is too
advanced for the kids you're working with, they are sure to find others
that aren't. There are many interesting ways to get a turtle from
here to there.

Dale Parson, Bell Labs, dale@mhcnet.att.com

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|     Suzanne Vega                                                     |
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