Brian Harvey
Fri, 26 Sep 2008 08:15:08 -0700
Sorry for starting a new thread, but I couldn't find a "reply" button on the web page. I'm honored to be the subject of a thread on this list! Thanks for all the compliments. First, here's the status of Berkeley Logo for the XO: It ran a year ago, but not in a Sugarizable form, because it required two X11 windows, an xterm and a separate graphics window. For the past year I've been working with some students on a wxWidgets-based version that will have a portable cross-platform GUI and, coincidentally, runs inside a single window. So I'm hoping we can easily Sugarize that. I just started the development effort and am stuck at the point of installing wxWidgets on the XO, because it requires gtk2.0-devel, which in turn requires some x11 package that exists only in an old version in the package repository you use. Any help with that would be appreciated -- I hate being stuck on these intellectually-trivial problems. I'm coming back to Boston for the Scratch conference, and am hoping to have at least a rough version running by then! > I've always gathered there were ideological differences, politely not talked > about, between his free version of logo and Seymour's proprietary versions > which evolved into microworlds This is putting it too strongly. It's okay with me that there are commercial versions of Logo -- I'm using Microworlds (as well as Berkeley Logo and Scratch) in an after-school class for 4th and 5th graders. I just want there to be free versions too. My ideological differences with Microworlds are more about the lack of support for debugging, things like the TRACE and STEP primitives. (When I complain, Brian Silverman says "You and three other people want that." :-) Given that they have only finite programming resources, that may even be a correct decision.) > (problem with Scratch is the lack of a high ceiling) Scratch may never be a complete Logo equivalent, but it's probably going to improve a lot in this respect. When I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago, I had a great disussion with the Scratch team about how they could give users the ability to define named procedures (the biggest limiting factor imho), and I think we made progress on a design. They quite rightly want everything in Scratch to have an obvious and visually apparent interface, but we agreed that it's the /invocation/ of a user-defined procedure that has to be obvious; someone defining procedures can be assumed not to be a complete beginner. > Brian was also involved in an object logo which only became available on the > Mac Another project, about 90% done (which means of course that 90% of the time is still ahead of us) is to add the Object Logo primitives to Berkeley Logo. There are some technical difficulties, e.g., getting object hierarchies to play well with shallow-bound procedure arguments. But, maybe next year. > But how isomorphic are the domains of maths and programming - and how > accessible to most kids... questions I wonder about ... I agree that in the current test-heavy educational climate this is going to be a hard sell -- one reason I'm teaching an after-school class, where you don't have to worry about tests. The distinction is between mathematical facts (4+7=11, the square root of 2 is irrational, the angle bisectors of a triangle meet at a point) and mathematical ways of thinking (manipulating a formal symbol system according to strict rules, generalizing from examples, etc.). It's hard to test the latter, but they're much more important in the long run, after the kids have forgotten all the specific facts they learn in school. California, where I live, has just made a rule that all 8th graders will be tested on algebra, starting in a few years, and there's a lot of controversy about this because people in schools think many of the kids just aren't cognitively ready for algebra yet and will fail. Even though a variable in a programming language is a very different thing from a variable in algebra (the latter doesn't really /vary/ when you're trying to solve an equation), it seems possible to me that computer programming experience might help kids get ready for algebra. Someone with more energy than I should get a grant to do a research project about this. _______________________________________________ Its.an.education.project mailing list Its.an.education.project@lists.lo-res.org http://lists.lo-res.org/mailman/listinfo/its.an.education.project