Mindstorms and Embodied Turtles (70s Educational Computing)

[Meadhbh Hamrick]

I was talking to *someone* about this over the last couple of weeks, but
can't remember who, so I figured I would send it to the list. It's
interesting enough on it's own.

When I was a kid, my mom was an educational researcher (which is why we
had a LINC and a Sun 3/60 and a NeXTSlab and a fractional T1 line at the
house.) My uncle was in charge of educational programs at TI. We
talked a LOT about Piaget and Papert and Solomon over the dinner table.
I wasn't officially one of the "Logo Kids", but my mom and her PhD
advisor had an office in Kendall Square in the same building with Papert
and Solomon, so we looked in on the progress of various Turtle devices
from time to time. The first Lisp program I wrote was actually a LOGO
program, but it was before the turtle was hooked up, so I made a simple
sentence generator; a list of nouns, a list of verbs and a function to
make prepositional phrases. (The next year my mom showed me Lisp and
explained the difference between m-expressions and s-expressions, and
away I went.)

In the 80s I read a little more about what they (Papert, Solomon, my
mom, Harbage, et al.) were trying to do. I was sort of amazed by
listening to various people (mostly Cindy Solomon) talk about what they
were trying to do: enable algorithmic thinking. Their project wasn't
teaching kids to program, but to get them to think about algorithms as
ways to solve problems. Learning programming was just a side effect. I
remembered a video showing kids in England in the 70s (before elementary
schools could afford computers) teaching "algorithmic thinking" by
having kids read off commands to other kids who executed the commands
(like "move forward two feet" and "turn right 60 degrees.") And I had
been looking for that video for at least a couple years now.

I think the process by which we all (kids and adults alike) construct
mental models to solve problems is fascinating and it's useful to know a
little bit about how complex concepts are communicated.

I finally found the video linked from a Bret Victor page (OF COURSE!)
Here's the video if you're hip to LOGO. It's equal parts hilarious and
fascinating.

https://youtu.be/BTd3N5Oj2jk?si=tW46RwFHRtcZ5E-Z

And here's the link to the "Learnable Programming" page Bret Victor put
together (where I finally found a reference to the above video I've been
looking for), which is fascinating on it's own:

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

And the Open Library link to Papert's Mindstorms, which is worth a read
if you've every thought about why some of your developers do a better
job of lifting concepts from design documents than others:

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3368926W/Mindstorms

Anyway... This gives me a bit of a motivation to get a PEB for my 99/4
so I can show off some LOGO programs I wrote when I was a kid. (though
I guess I have an apple //c, which also had a LOGO.)

-cheers!
-m
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[Meadhbh Hamrick]

Apropos of conversations earlier today about Logo... The latest episode
of the ANTIC podcast has an interview with Cynthia Solomon, who was
Seymour Papert's partner on many of the Logo related projects. Brian
Silverman is also interviewed who apparently did much of the heavy
lifting for Atari Logo implementation (it's the Antic Podcast, after
all.) Good stuff if you're hip to Logo.

https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/antic-interview-435-cynthia-solomon-and-brian-silverman-logo

This episode ticks the Alan Kay, Apple ][, Seymour Papert, Marvin
Minsky, Cynthia Solomon, Atari, PDP I, Lisp Machines, Max Behensky,
Floor Turtle, Chris Crawford, Brenda Laurel, Atari Luxury Car Garage and
Logo boxes on your retro-computing bingo card.

If you want to experience Atari LOGO for yourself and you don't have
your 800XL handy, you can always wander over to the Internet Archive and
run it in your browser.

https://archive.org/details/a8b_cart_Atari_LOGO_1983_Atari

(I recommend looking at this picture of the 800's keyboard to get an
idea for where backspace (Ctrl-'), square brace open (Shift-,) and
square brace close (Shift-.) are.)

https://keyboard-design.com/layouts/60/Atari-800.jpg

And the Atari Logo Reference Manual can be found at:

https://archive.org/details/AtariLOGOReferenceManual/mode/2up

But it recommends reading the Introduction to Programming through Turtle
Graphics book as an introduction. Unfortunately, I can only find the
Apple II version, but it looks like much of the content is similar, if
not the same:

https://archive.org/details/alitpttg/mode/2up

I would be remiss if I didn't also point out the Inexorable Tash's
JavaScript Logo interpreter:

https://www.calormen.com/jslogo/

And Brian Harvey's UCB Logo page, which includes PDF downloads for
"Symbolic Computing", "Advanced Techniques" and "Beyond Programming"
which are worth reading.

https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html

What email to a retro-computing list would be complete without a
reference to BYTE magazine? Here's the Archive's scan of the Logo issue:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08

[Randall Kindig]

Thank you for the great summary of my interview!

Cynthia gave me a host of other names involved with Logo and the Atari Cambridge Research Lab that I hope to be able to follow up on for future interviews. 

Randy Kindig

co-host ANTIC Podcast ataripodcast.com 

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Randy