🚀 go-pugleaf

chuck@ksr.com (Chuck Shavit) writes:
>Why would you want to teach Logo to very young children?  As I understand
>it, Logo is a tool for developing math and programming skills.  But at the
>level described above, it seems to me that there is very little educational
>(math and programming) value to a session in which the very young kid press
>some buttons on the keyboard and watch the effect on a graphics display.

Certainly I wouldn't want a kid (or anyone!) to play with Logo *instead of*
having lots of other experiences, both with and without a computer.

Caveat #2:  My teaching experience is all high school and above, so I'm now
talking about my understanding of other people's ideas, not my own work.

I think that the idea of Logo for young kids is partly to get across the idea
of algorithms -- that a repeatable set of instructions causes something repeatable
to happen on the screen -- and also partly to begin developing the ideas of
distance and angle.  The kid who uses an INSTANT program isn't working with
numbers, but is doing a sort of pre-number exploration in which pushing the
button once causes a little change and pushing the button a bunch causes a
bigger change.

Much of this sort of thing has been done by researchers whose interest was to
see just how young a child can be and still understand mathematical things.
(Did you see the article in the news yesterday about some study that seems
to show tiny preverbal kids understanding 1+1=2?)  I'm not terribly interested
in accelerating kids, but it *is* interesting to know what's possible.

By the way, programming skill isn't mostly what Logo is about; the idea is to
use programming in service of the mathematics.  (Although I'm an exception
because I use Logo to teach people computer science.)