About Logo
What is Logo?
Logo is an educational programming language, designed in 1967 by Daniel G. Bobrow, Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert
and Cynthia Solomon. Today the language is remembered mainly for its use of "turtle graphics", in which commands for movement and drawing produced line graphics either on screen or with a small robot called a "turtle". (see more on wikipedia.org)
Seymour Papert from MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory invented TurtleGraphics in the 70s. Find out his description of it:
... "the turtle." You can think of this as a drawing
instrument... Imagine that you are looking at a computer
screen. On it you see a small turtle, which moves when
you type commands in a language called "turtle talk,"
leaving a line as it goes. The command "Forward 50"
causes the turtle to move straight ahead a certain
distance. " Forward 100" will make it move in the same
direction twice as far. You soon get the idea that the
numbers represent the distance it moves; they can be
thought of as turtle steps. Now if you want to make it
go in a different direction, you give it a command like
"Right 90." It stays in the same place but turns on
itself, facing east if it had previously been facing
north. With this knowledge you should easily be able to
make it draw a box. If that's easy for you, you can
think about how to draw a circle, and if that's easy you
can try a spiral. Somewhere you will meet your level of
difficulty, and when you do I'll give you this piece of
advice: Put yourself in the place of the turtle. Imagine
yourself moving in the outline of a box or a circle or
a spiral or whatever it may be.
Video Archive
Bibliography / Further reading
• Logo Foudation
• The Logo Turtle by Seymour Papert et al
• BFOIT - Introduction to computer programming
• Berkeley Logo (UCBLogo) by Brian Harvey
• Berkeley Logo Reference Manual
• Logo programming - an introduction to Logo by Mike Koss
• Logo, fractals and recursion by Eric Dobbs
• UT Dallas Computer Science Outreach - LOGO Workshop
• Logo 15 Word Contest
