5 Young students and future teachers
as passengers on the Logo engine
Ivan Kalas and Andrej Blaho
Department of Informatics Education
Comenius University, Bratislava
Slovak Republic
Abstract
In 1994 we released a new version of the Logo language. We now concentrate on
research into new educational possibilities offered by this environment. We want
to provide Logo users with a strong and flexible developers' tool for exploring,
creating and playing. Together with our university students - future teachers of
mathematics and informatics - we run a seminar on implementing informatics in
primacy and lower secondary education. The goal of the seminar for the 1995/96
school year was to develop a modern one-year course on informatics for lower
secondary students, supported by a series of open microworlds which should
provide creative laboratories to explore major ideas embedded in turtle geometry,
mathematics, multimedia, logic and algorithmics.
Keywords
Programming language Logo, curriculum development, open learning, teacher
education, tools.
IN1RODUCTION
The main thrust in teaching Logo is the process rather than
the final outcome of an activity (Shimabukuro, 1988).
In 1994 we released a new version of the Logo language, (Blaho et al., 1994;
Stuur, 1994), with the ambition to make use of all the powerful features of the
Windows environment and to provide complete support for turtle geometry,
enhanced Logo data structures, multimedia, multiple turtles and the handling of
complex graphics. Since then our Logo has appeared in more than ten national
Information and Communications Technologies in School Mathematics
J.D. Tinsley & D.C. Johnson (Eds.)
© 1998 IFIP. Published by Chapman & Hall