teaching fns & HOFs using Logo?

[Elango Cheran]

Hi everyone,

I've been thinking for a while about Logo as a means of teaching programming and/or Clojure to beginners, but since talking with Yoko and hearing her presentation at Clojure/West, I wanted to turn the idea into action.

After all, Logo is a Lisp that we teach to kids because it is simple & easy.  And those kids using Logo are doing well with fns and higher-order-fns (and even prefix notation ?) all without knowing (or needing to know) the formal terminology of what they're doing!  When you think about the popularity of Scratch/BYOB, which is just a visual version of Logo, and that code.org uses Scratch to introduce programming to kids, the question we should think about is -- why do we teach kids Lisp for its benefits, but by the time that they grow into adults, they think Lisp is hard or too strange-looking, or they don't believe in Lisp's magical powers? :-P  How can we make that Lisp-Lisp connection between Logo and Clojure something that benefits ClojureBridge and Clojure (and programmers in general)?

I came up with a proof-of-concept of how Logo could be adapted for Clojure and for ClojureBridge curriculum:

https://github.com/google/clojure-turtle

I'm hoping to hear what you all think see if this is something that we can adpat somehow for ClojureBridge.  

( You're actually the first people I wanted to tell about this, but somehow it's on HN at the moment, not by design or expectation -- you can read a little more ideas I have there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9710836 )

-- Elango

[Bridget Hillyer]

Hi Elango.

What a great idea! It looks really interesting. I like that it uses Quil. It would be interesting to try it out at one of the workshops. Minneapolis has one coming up. Maybe post this to the ClojureBridge Workshops list, too?

Bridget

[Nola Stowe]

Cool, i'll check it out!

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[Yoko Harada]

Hi all,

This turtle app is a good one to connect to using/writing functions. So, I wrote ClojureBridge version of turtle app. This app supports multiple turtles, got colors and utility functions. The implementation is based on Elango's work, but vastly re-written.

- document

    https://github.com/yokolet/welcometoclojurebridge/blob/turtle/TURTLE.md

- implementation

    https://github.com/yokolet/welcometoclojurebridge/blob/turtle/src/clojurebridge_turtle/core.clj

The reasons I rewrote the app are to make it

- sequence study friendly

- more Clojure-ish functional programming

- fun stuff by names and colors

Although it may not be Logo-ish anymore, the purpose here is to learn functional programming in Clojure.

I'm planning to incorporate this turtle app to curriculum, for example, (forward 40) instead of (eat "sandwich"). Probably, "Functions" section can be more understandable and less mathy.

Take a look!

- Yoko

[Elango Cheran]

Looks good!  I like the colors and multiple turtles a lot!  I think this will go a long way in smoothing out the learning curve for beginners.

-- Elango