We didn’t know it was programming, we thought we were instructing a turtle (with paint on his tail) how to draw pictures. But we were learning how to solve problems with functions, loops and select statements.
I didn’t realize it until I was in high school and learning C, I just remembered it as a really neat computer drawing class.
Scratch is probably an improvement, I haven’t looked at it too hard though.
Is this in anyway similar to Turtledraw? Looks like a similar concept (programming the maths to make a turtle draw graphics). I’ve seen a load of different implementations, from something similar to Logo (where it’s drawing on the screen), to where it’s drawing using a physical robot with a marker pen and a big sheet of paper on the floor, to a variation called Turtlestitch which controlled an embroidery machine.
I spoke to a woman at a conference last year who uses Turtlestitch to teach 7 year olds advanced programming paradigms.
They’re likely related in that they’re using a similar teaching method of having the student image that they’re the turtle and then reason how their instructions would affect the outcome. It’s easier for kids to learn that way than to try to explain the high level concepts, and later once they have the intuition of what a loop is, or a select statement, they can learn the more abstract terms.
They taught us computer programming concepts, in elementary school, in the 90s with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
We didn’t know it was programming, we thought we were instructing a turtle (with paint on his tail) how to draw pictures. But we were learning how to solve problems with functions, loops and select statements.
I didn’t realize it until I was in high school and learning C, I just remembered it as a really neat computer drawing class.
Scratch is probably an improvement, I haven’t looked at it too hard though.
Is this in anyway similar to Turtledraw? Looks like a similar concept (programming the maths to make a turtle draw graphics). I’ve seen a load of different implementations, from something similar to Logo (where it’s drawing on the screen), to where it’s drawing using a physical robot with a marker pen and a big sheet of paper on the floor, to a variation called Turtlestitch which controlled an embroidery machine.
I spoke to a woman at a conference last year who uses Turtlestitch to teach 7 year olds advanced programming paradigms.
They’re likely related in that they’re using a similar teaching method of having the student image that they’re the turtle and then reason how their instructions would affect the outcome. It’s easier for kids to learn that way than to try to explain the high level concepts, and later once they have the intuition of what a loop is, or a select statement, they can learn the more abstract terms.