UCBLogo, see Brian’s page), bundled with the book The Great Logo Adventure: Discovering Logo on and Off the Computer by Jim Muller.You can find a downloadable version of Jim’s book if you dig into the Softronix website, as well as other Logo-related links.Or you can try Brian’s three-volume The Great Logo Adventure: Discovering Logo on and Off the Computer for a rigorous introduction to serious Logo programming, at the Berkeley Logo site.SUSE Linux (my favorite) often chokes when compiling apps, like Berkeley Logo, from source, so I sought out a new Logo experience.Only two– NetLogo, from Uri Wilensky, Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Northwestern University and StarLogo, from the MIT Media Lab–met all my needs. Research on “programmable bricks” at MIT during the 1990s produced the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit, powered by Logo.My own first Logo was from Brian Harvey, creator of Berkeley Logo (a.k.a. Robotics is just as well-suited to Logo: just turn the virtual turtle into a real robot. Real programming comes quickly with loops (“repeat”), conditionals (“if”), and procedures.Logo works well for teaching geometry: create a line by telling the turtle to draw as it moves forward create a square by telling it, four times, to draw a line and turn 90 degrees. Tell the turtle to go forward 50 units onscreen with the command “fd 50” turn to the right with the command “rt 90”. Seymour Papert, mathematician, educator and co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, designed Logo as a programming language easy enough for kids to pick up fast, but sufficiently robust to serve as a platform for computing projects of almost any complexity.Programming in Logo means using the “turtle”: an entity that lives in the Logo environment and responds to commands you give it, either interactively at a command line, or through interpreted programs.As Java apps, NetLogo and StarLogo both run everywhere, so choice is as much a matter of taste as function. But once sorted out, it becomes almost trivial to tweak programs by adding, changing, or removing behaviors, er, I mean procedures. Both come with Logo code for modeling bird flocking, prey/predator population variations, gas molecule diffusion, creating fractal images, demonstrating mathematical and statistical theorems and much more.The biggest hurdle: understanding that to program turtles, screen “patches”, and overall (“observer”) behaviors, you issue those commands in different modes. And my final Number 1: an active project with a community of users and developers.Where UCBLogo offers a basic interface to control and watch the turtle, NetLogo and StarLogo both make it trivial to create and control many turtles, making it dead simple to simulate large population behaviors. Other Number 1: my Logo be free.If it helps at all, I’m happy. And the revision that solves all my problems is invariably due just six months hence.Free software never disappoints. I still must study the new program to make it work the license precludes returning it if I’m unsatisfied, or selling it to someone else for whom it may work better. My computer runs no faster, nor can it do much more than before. Whenever I buy software, I read the box or other promotional material, and I buy into the product: it’s going to change my life, so I’m happy to spend my hard-earned bucks for it.But after the install comes the disappointment.
![]() ![]() It looks extremely cool and capable of doing some very excellent things like gaming, all in a format accessible to kids. Elica is a Windows-only, 3D Logo apparently free but I couldn’t verify. Logo Resources Free Logo Implementations I’d rather go for the sure thing. Perhaps a commercial product could do so much more, but it’s still a gamble. ![]() Logo Program Seymour Papert Mac OSX VersionManaging shell command history in OS X/Linux Encrypting text at the command line with GnuPG Computer Science Logo Style ( vol 1, vol 2, vol 3) The Great Logo Adventure [ (text), (companion CD) rLogo is Logo for the web sparsely supported (?) and released under the GNU license. XLogo is a Mac OSX version of Logo released under BSD license.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorKrista ArchivesCategories |