

Twenty Things to do with a Computer (1971) [pdf] - brudgers
http://www.stager.org/articles/twentythings.pdf

======
muonneutrino
This seems like a far more hands-on and inspiring approach to teaching
computer science to elementary, middle, or high school students than the
typical intro to CS classes you see now, which might occasionally have some
graphical interfaces, but primarily (at least in my limited experience)
operate on the command line and do a variety of abstract things. It's a lot
harder to fall in love with a sorting algorithm than with a turtle drawing
robot or the interesting geometric patterns shown on pages 14-16.

~~~
enupten
....or worse, build "web apps" with javascript! (Yes I've actually seen a
school do this :)

------
sdg1
Cynthia Solomon (the co-author of the memo) maintains a collection of
interesting documents and videos from and on the early days of Logo:
[http://logothings.wikispaces.com/](http://logothings.wikispaces.com/)
(especially:
[http://logothings.wikispaces.com/Readings](http://logothings.wikispaces.com/Readings))

~~~
abecedarius
"The kids became teachers to the math educators attending the conference. The
kids were incredible. Rumors spread such as Seymour could teach anybody
anything. When it was discovered that I did the teaching, the rumors changed
to we bribed the kids with candy."

------
justincormack
Everyone should read Papert's Mindstorms book, about teaching kids to code. It
is one of the best books about learning there is.

------
Tyrannosaurs
Ah, the naivity of predictions.

Play "Space War"? As if games on a computer will ever catch on - we're all too
busy making turtles and drawing men with them...

~~~
valarauca1
Honestly one thing I feel Star Trek got 100% correct (or will be 100% correct)
is holodeck, and holodeckaddiction.

I can definitely see people being treated psychologically for hating the real
world. Especially with current advances in VR. It already happens with the
internet, and that's barely immersive.

------
8_hours_ago
Logo was the first programming language that I was exposed to as an elementary
school aged child. I remember thinking that it was neat to draw something on
the screen, but I didn't really understand enough geometry/trigonometry to
draw anything interesting... Logo requires more math skills than I had at that
age. I had better luck with QBASIC.

I really like the idea of hardware devices to teach programming, and unlike
when this paper was written, now there are lots of different (and cheap)
devices which are designed for that exact purpose. I wish they had those when
I was growing up.

------
ianseyer
well this explains [http://goo.gl/JLPkyi](http://goo.gl/JLPkyi)!

~~~
pma8sb
Fuck URL shorteners.

[https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/turtle.html](https://docs.python.org/3.3/library/turtle.html)

You're welcome.

------
stinos
_BIRD TURD_

gotta love that one

For the rest: this is actually quite good and way more thorough and
interesting than what I ever got in school ('let's make a class' style stuff).
Especially the links to real-life physics etc.

------
subdane
#1 - Make a Turtle. #2 Program the Turtle to Draw a Man. Origins of logo!

------
hudathun
So, turtles all the way then ...

