My site, The Daily Papert, hosts the world’s largest collection of texts, recordings, and videos by my friend and colleague, Dr. Seymour Papert. (The site is a passion project in constant need of TLC.) As new Papert-related documents are discovered, they are shared at The Daily Papert.
Since Logo is one of Papert’s most enduring and powerful ideas, the site has been building a collection of related resources. Logo was the first programming language developed for learners (co-invented with Cynthia Solomon and Wally Feurzeig). This page helps educators, parents, and scholars understand the design, influences, and purpose of Logo; includes Logo conference proceedings dating back to 1984; and shares digital versions of classic books for learning or teaching with Logo.
Today, I am pleased to share a classic (out-of-print) book for the world to enjoy.
Dr. E. Paul Goldenberg has been a friend, colleague, and mentor since the mid-1980s. He is a mathematician, linguist, early pioneer in the use of technology with special needs children, who recently retired as the Senior Scientist at Education Development Center. In 1987, Paul and Wally Feurzeig published one of my all-time Logo programming books for educators, Exploring Language with Logo.
The delightful, playful, and intellectually rich projects explored in this book may be more relevant in the age of AI Mania than when first published 35 years ago.
Exploring Language with Logo uses the underutilized word and list processing functionality of Logo to “mess about” with phonetics, grammar, poetry, language translation, and more in a mathematical context that instantly requires readers to confront probabilistic behavior, conditionals, variables, functions, recursion, parsing, concatenation, and countless big ideas from linguistics, computer science, mathematics, and literature. All of these learning adventures reveal the power of symbolic programming and prompt children to spontaneously exclaim, “Hey! This is just like AI.”
Since schools favor “language arts” over any hint of “math,” Exploring Language with Logo should be a perfect on-ramp to bringing computation to all students across the curriculum.
Through the generosity of Paul Goldenberg, I have been granted permission to scan and share this fantastic book with the world on The Daily Papert’s Logo page! While there, be sure to check out the other fantastic books available for download or reading online.
The projects suggested in Exploring Language with Logo can easily be explored in Lynx (a web-based version of Logo) or Snap! (a web-based block programming language). As interest dictates and time allows, I (or the community) will help translate the programming code in Goldenberg and Feurzeig’s book into modern Logo dialects.
That said, the book itself offers guidance for doing so, despite its age. If you get stuck, please reach out.
I truly hope that you and your students loved this book as much as I do. While there, check out the other legendary books now available in digital form.
Participate in Constructing Modern Knowledge 2024 and learn to learn in exciting ways!