Cynthia Solomon - Logo, A Computer Language to Grow With

well I'm very pleased to be hearing to see all you know and to talk with you a little bit about the history of logo and I subtitled this computer language to grow with and you can decide what that means friends of mine when I gave him the title objected so in thinking about logo I have two major mentors in my life Seymour Papert was one of them and Seymour was the originator of logo and my other mentor is was Marvin Minsky and - Marvin and Seymour collaborated for about 20 years very closely one breathe and the other did you know with that kind of very close relationship and originally their focus was on thinking about machines and how to make them think and in the process also thinking about how children think and how thinking about that there might be some ways to help children think better about their own thinking if Marvin and Seymour collaborated in 1964 on robotics vision and their students and so there's this let me just get it going there there's of this video [Music] it would be interesting to see this Martin do things that are going to build world in the early 1960s and Sony nothing but an arrant two interfaces between television company and mechanical hands so we had to find something basically we had a table with a lot of objects and we build an object [Music] and then we the machine to see me and say build another one most of this research recipe very hard law projects to the simplest thing that but they never watched what an 18 month trial does to your own child slow down video and watch the hundreds of externality very few minutes then when people talk about an attention span of a child realized that they do things that very few adults would ever dream of working that horrible apologize for the quality of the video that that was shot in 485 whatever you know low-res for today but I read for that time which was in the early 90s Oh see I'm not put it there stop it oops so logo was born in 1966 it it started at a company called bolt Beranek and Newman a research company in Cambridge Massachusetts and I I was part of the education Technology Group and Seymour was a consultant and there were a couple of projects we thought of logo we all had a list background so we thought of logo as baby list we got rid of the parentheses and there was no lambda and the first versions of logo were weird but anyway that was our model and here's a picture of Seymour and his great thing was that children deserved a computer language of their own the the work at BBN there were there was a project using a language called tell comp which was based on jaws which is was an algebraic language very similar to basic and it was being used by children and Seymour was particularly struck by the children learning algebra using an algebraic language they didn't understand algebra and they certainly didn't understand the algebraic language so that was a Seymour really sort of said exploding with ideas about a language for children and I want to just say a little bit about his background Seymour was always interested in children but before he joined Marvin in 1964 he had spent five years with Jean Piaget in Geneva and Puja is the person that showed us that children are thinkers they're theorists they have ideas they're not empty vessels they're not following a behaviorist principle that we could just open they're you know I love it you open your breath their brains and pour the information in and kids I showed us that children indeed have their own theories they're not adult theories and so that's a theme that runs through logo respecting children's ideas and expecting them to contribute so I want to just play you this video and see more because it brings out who Seymour was a damn it's a low-res I'm sorry but it exists so well [Music] [Music] the babies but this is we can't we love our kids [Music] [Music] I'm sorry that it was a little hard to hear I apologize for that I had to work on that if this was a student of Seymour's who built that giraffe the mechanical giraffe there which is what got the whole she was an MIT student did that oh so here's the team that 1966 there's Seymour and me Danny Barbara who who was head of the AI group at vvn and also had just finished his doctoral work with Marvin and Seymour and and then they were and he Danny of course was a lisp enthusiast and then Wally foyers Ike who was head of the education Technology Group and so I explained here what their backgrounds were and there was a one other person whose picture I don't have he was a programmer part of the ed tech group and had been a math undergraduate at MIT so after presenting to us the ideas for logo and the logo he presented us with was very different from the eventual version of logo but by 1967 we had a working logo Danny hits implementing it and Lisp on this SDS time of 9:40 time shared computer at BBN it was pretty powerful computer and we had teletypes as communication devices and we see more taught a group of children for a couple of weeks using this logo and Wally and I were observers and Seymour and I had great deep but sessions afterwards discussing and I've have a picture there of the Beatles Lonely Hearts Club Band because it was released in 1967 so I thought it would give you a perspective anyway after that experience we totally revised logo and implemented it on some machine called the digital equipments pdp-1 and that's what if he one looked like BBN had the first or second pdp-1 in 1961 and in fact John McCarthy who was the author of Lisp and a professor eventually at Stanford but was it MIT at the time he built the first time sharing system do you know about time sharing a lot of people don't the the great and it was at BBN on this type of machine that John's ideas for time share and got implemented it meant that more than one person could use a computer at the same time it you know we didn't get laptops until the 90 the eighties so just think before then computers were very expensive but people were using them the all over the place with you know time sharing so in 1968-69 seymour and i team taught a group of 12 year olds we call them seventh graders and it's was a local a school local to be the end we had 12 children 12 teletypes some of them were model 35 s and some of them were model 33 and this is a look into the classroom that we were given everything was uppercase okay all communication with the computer was an uppercase we were lucky we had communication so that the pvp one was back at BBN and over phone lines we had these 12 systems working and that was a rarity one machine one [Music] input device to the other so there's Seymour with some kids and there's me and then two girls at a teletype each of them those were model 35 I can tell and one of what the kinds of projects we did with I in fact I didn't start the teaching nor did Seymour we had a regular math teacher who hadn't much experience with computing and her idea of introducing kids was to teach them syntax and I went away when I came back and visit I was very surprised that feedback wasn't given to her that that was probably not a good way of doing things anyway what happened is seen when I team thought we took over the teaching and everything was project-based with us and the kinds of projects we did because I logo was designed to be a programming language to play with words and sentences we didn't have any Turtles or I think we were lucky we attended language for children one of the projects which this displays was making English sentences up and things like that one of the surprising comments that the children gave because their first example the first time they made the their programs run and it was the Senators were garbled and their reaction was oh that's why they call them nouns and verbs and here's an example of logo code to generate English sentences so what the kids did was have a procedure so logo was procedural and have a procedure for with a collection of nouns verbs adjectives and cent etc and then a super procedure that put those things together syndrome was the super procedure and that given the vocabulary there that's the kind of sentence that got generated and I remember a math educator at the time had been begging me to come and is it and finally I said okay and she came into the mat into the classroom and when I'm pulling her hair where's the mat she said think think that there was no mathematics to this experience and because there weren't any you know but what this led to if she had come back the next week she would have seen what this led to was generating simple math sentences so here's an example of a logo code that generated the kind of proposed like five times box plus 10 equals 35 what is box ria voided talking about variables we avoided talking about x and y we could give in the list tradition we could give things long names we could give procedures long names and we could give things we call we thought about things long names and so we refer to this as box and as you can see here it would repeat the question until you got the right answer it didn't help you later the kids worked on projects like this that would help the user the other thing kinds of projects we did my ruler with them was if you play a game because they all want to play games you have to write it so a project that we did with them was one tile NIM and in the debugging process we introduced this little person in little man model and as a way of tracing through of behavior of your procedures so then played took three inputs and one guy spoke to another guy spoke to another guy and eventually procedures came back so underlying ideas for logo was were definitely procedural thinking debugging project-based learning talking we really encourage kids to talk about what they were doing and we we thought of as we said we gave them words and sentences to play with and we also did a lot of identifying and encourage them to identify with their procedures and in the debugging process to to identified with the procedures and their own bugs so logo became the name of a programming language a programming environment and a culture and the culture encouraged a way of thinking about computers and about learning and as I said it was base it really was based on ways of helping people think about their own thinking reflecting so after that projects you see Moore who was a professor at MIT anyway we left BBN and started at the logo groove as part of the MIT a our lab and so there's a picture of Marvin with arms he's designed to an arm and students this is just an aside in the early seventies we're working on blocks worlds da our students in case you're interested anyway here more pictures and one of the I think logo wouldn't have shaped up the way of did if it hadn't been part of the AI lab because there was this wonderful world of that Marvin encouraged that of respecting students and their students love and and of randoms were attracted to the ease with which they had access to computing with Marvin and with a couple of other people and as opposed to at that time the major way of communicating with the computer was through punched card decks and you submitted your deck if you didn't drop it it ran and maybe the next day you got results so the process of debugging what was really weird in those days and this is a group of hackers brilliant people who were playing Richard green let's magic the first chess program that went into tournaments I mean it didn't win them all or anything but it it did play in tournaments and if I have to point out they and then a lot of these people were earlier part of the group that built space war the first programming of the first really interesting computer game on a PvP one it was the only game I could stand playing I was nothing and anyway and and the thing about this group also were so the philosophy was you could do almost anything but when you got into trouble you could get yourself out or find somebody to help you if it wasn't the term hacker was positive it's still used in the AI people as a positive thing but today outside of that world it's considered negative these people were not Destroyers they were builders and it made quite a difference anyway in 1970 I'm jumping around in 1970 we had a floor turtle and a display turtle the results of this 1969 experience was that words and sentences were great but we needed something more concrete for them to play with and Seymour came up with the idea of turtles and because we were with these great hackers and some of them did incredible graphics work we got they understood that about turtles and Marvin and was very instrumental in directing the development of floor turtles Marvin was a builder he in fact made we had a four voice music box for logo and Marvin built it for us so anyway their first big public presentation was April 11th when there was a conference a one-day symposium called teaching children thinking and we had um is well what it said Marvin led a panel discussion with our renewal and Bob Bob Davis was an math educator who eventually became prominent in the Plato math education project if you know what Plato was but you can look it up and Pat su v--'s who was the standard for behaviorist approach to CAI computer assisted instruction do you know what that is you don't know what computer assisted answer well in those days it was giving kids problems and waiting for the correct solutions lots of them drill and practice is another name for it you know what that was okay well that's what Sookie's he was the most successful hit a very successful company and he was at Stanford and that was you know anyway here is in 1970-71 Seymour and I taught fifth or 10 year olds at a school near MIT and we had finally a display turtle that was a vector display driven by a general I forget super nova and then over the phone line back to the pdp-10 at MIT where there was a logo running and instead of having teletypes we have that great exec you push but still things are an upper case and there's Marvin's music box had four voices and there was two kinds of the yellow turtle was its parts were found in a DoD dumping station and the other one was is the first one that was built in the AI lab and so here's the kind of graphics that kids did and this is we always had some kind of animation and that is an example of the kind of animation we had oh yes I'm not - and this is what people think of when they think of logo they they think of turtle geometry turtle graphics and this is there are two procedures there one's called poly and the figures on the left are drawn by poly and the poly spy which makes spirals and what's the difference out of this the most powerful idea that came from this we thought was the total turtle trick theorem which meant that if the turtle turns a multiple of 360 and goes forward a consistent amount it will come back to its starting state and so there you see that the poly given different inputs draws close figures and the poly spy since it changes its step size each time never the turtle never returns to its starting state and so here's another example of the floor turtle and kids call that squirrel even though it was triangular and this is Seymour in nineteen the spring of 1970 [Music] oh yes oh yes and this is one of the other things we introduce kids to with sort of circus arts where our ways of thinking procedurally and so we have we taught them to walk on stilts and juggle ride a unicycle and Bongo board and this is similar in the bongo board and me pushing him whoops I'll go back to it I'll just and he was very good at that this one is an example of a child on the bungo board so actually yeah oh so anyway this is just another summit a summation of logo environment and this environment continued what was interesting I expect under having a reunion this week in 1972 we went to Exeter England and I went there with a crew from the AI lab with a PvP 11 digital equipment PDP 11 but dick had sold to Exeter the University of Exeter so they also we had a new version of logo running on this PDP 11 and we also had the guys had designed a turtle graphics terminal and so that also went with us in the music box and a couple of the turtle floor turtles went to Exeter with us and I went very careful weeks before the conference and I had set up to work with children and I'm meeting with three of the 12 year olds this week because they're now pushing 60 [Music] but I haven't seen them but one of them one of them his name is Jonathan pledge he got written out the in Hal Abelson book turtle geometry I don't know if you're familiar with it it's a free download these days and he um how called him John but his name was Jonathan and what he developed him using turtles was very new to us at that time and Jonathan is credited with the maze escaping program and this just if I took this from house book you're welcome to read it and that was pretty exciting for us that this 12 year old did did this and one of the things that came from being in Exeter England was we started a company called general turtle and the intention Seema's brother who had was and what was in I forget where he was in England somewhere he joined us in the States and Marvin and Seymour and me and a couple of other people and Alan pirate Seymour's brother started this company and the intention was to make Turtles available because and one of the results was Marvin designed a logo computer and I have a video of Marvin sitting how it was cheap this is just before laughs our personal computing hit the stage like a year before something this was 74 70 for about and Marvin said it was cheaper was only $5,000 and here's what it was a vector graphics and this is a kind of Pokemon this was the kind of graphics you could do it was kind it was really nice you could spin and then go forward and then spin and go forward and it became a business computer for a while because it couldn't it didn't compete with even with the little laptops so another thing that was going on and the AI lab was this a radio program at that time was an undergraduate and she created a button box so that and a special version called tortoise of the logo system so she was working with three-year-olds and they were talking to the turtle through this button box another important element was in having multiple turtles in colors and that happened because of a sprite board actually the original spray board was built by Danny Hill was a student of Marvins and undergraduate at MIT at the time and eventually Texas Instruments took it over and so the first version was this where you could have 32 Turtles it was very exciting and then the next in big thing for me was reformed another company Marvin Seymour in me and and some other people called Lobo computer systems which still exists and there had been a version of logo for the the little Apple computers but as a company we made a whole new version an apple core it was a sort of an apple product I wrote this introductory thing and we'd worked very hard on the graphics for the little book and here's an ad that Apple ran for Apple logo and one of the things that hits me is that Apple logo runs on the Apple 2 with 64k of memory and you know that's what fits on a credit card these days but anyway so the next thing for me was Alan Kay I don't know how many of you know Alan Kay is the small talk person and a lot of you people are involved with small talk Alan has a history had before he went to park he came to visit me and Seymour and the children and said that his environment had to do what we did and more so the base work if the early small talk early small talk was a language for children where there was going to be heavy daily graphics great word processing and powerful programming language anyway he became event chief scientist for Atari and he set me up with a research lab in Cambridge Massachusetts we lasted for two years and then Atari got closed and bought and sold and whatever and a lot of the things we did including some of the people became part of the Media Lab which started when in 1984 or they say five but people started in four so this is a short video talking about what [Music] [Music] we looked at ways to control the hubris of gestures by touch by gross body movement we designed an object-oriented logo and developed applications in it we built several mechanical devices to have your dimensions to computing environments we began to build tools for the musical playstation and as always we continue our work with children [Music] so the things when we closed the things that the the joists the force feedback joystick went to MIT and decane somebody's doctoral work and they built a better one later but initially there was that and few other things and whoops and one of the other things that came about was Margaret Minsky Brian Harvey and I edited a collection of Atari logo projects that are good friends wrote and since Atari shut down this book is didn't last long and as far as the logo history Seymour got involved with Lego and there was a version of logo called Lego logo when the when the first versions of their you know motors and so on with Lego came out Lego logo was part of the package but then Lego decided to scrap Lego logo and go with LabVIEW for the programming language anyway going for today I'm going on to look here's an example of how to make a turtle geometry images in well turtle art which is a dedicated environment to turtle graphics written by Brian Silverman then there's an example of how to write the same sort of thing in logo and then there's an example of how to write a similar thing in snap snap for those of you who don't know it is based on scratch it it is designed by Brian Harvey who was a logo enthusiast and a great programmer and it gave you first-class objects it gave you procedures and so on that scratch doesn't have I can't really do turtle geometry easily inscribed because of the way the sprites are organized and you can see in in snap there's something that has a heading that I can see that's little turtle sprite and this is I had to well anyway this is an example of writing an art for say I'm going on my new project I have to talk to you I'm pushing it I'm advertising this is my book and I edited it I only wrote one little piece in it it's a collection of essays by Marvin Minsky so it's about thinking and about helping children to think and there were six essays this is my co-editor her name is Xiao Xiao and she also made 80 illustrations for the book she's she's in Marvin's living room on a trapeze and Marvin is sitting on the couch it's very poor quality everything is but and she was an undergraduate at MIT and she got her doctorate at the Media Lab and she knew Marvin then because her master's and doctorate work were on music she's was a fantastic pianist but she also here she is a just she just sent me this picture hurt her master C cos she could see Marvin playing and she could copy play with him and that anyway that was her master's thesis so these are just some of her great drawings and if you read the book I'm not going on what they are this is this young lady just such a late he's fantastic but you can you get a sense of different tones from each of these people introducing the SATs sort of I think a little bit of an intuition around the fact that people really do things very differently okay I didn't pay her somebody sent me this she posted it on her Facebook Twitter account web stop yep and this is a wonderful interview of Marvin talking about I can't find it some one of the troubles with education Theory until recently is that people have this idea that the best way to learn is to make it positive experience everything should be good the child should be guided just make very small steps so that they can't make any serious mistakes and you learned everything when you're all done I can do the job without thinking because you know exactly what to do well I don't fit that kind of learning leads to becoming very good at new trousers because you haven't learned enough about bugs so we really got to teach children to enjoy anything yes and whatever and so and these are this is just an advertisement for my book and these are the wonderful people that contributed to the book and I think that's enough I think that's right my newest project is being on advising this company tinker which has been using a version of scratch and making things for kids they want my advice I looked at some of the stuff and I found a few bugs so we'll see what happens and his shell show again I think or who I think this is sure oh yeah I played this for you in the beginning right and those of you who missed it here it is chef's shout for the past two and a half years taught herself the theremin and she said [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] well I'm going to stop it I'm going to stop it if I can and see I went on a lot I could go on more I didn't give you a lot of details like I would have loved to it just gave you a lot of history and Heather here just told me that when she was a kid she's not a kid anymore slightly older now jeromy's and I thought that was pretty remarkable because a lot of people never heard of it theremin didn't know what it was and here I have come across a theremin expert I wouldn't I wouldn't go that far this is very they're very simple things but a little oscillators are not very that yeah you can make a very bad one that's what I made it made a very bad one yeah I think is by my book yes so we have some time for questions if you'd like to take a few now we also have a question and answer session for some computing education folks from the UK here and I am told that there is a room for you all to go have a Q&A with Cynthia but ahead of that would you like to take some questions now I mean we can take some questions with the audience are you I'm happy to take questions one other thing I didn't tell you where is Tomas he's there he's my shepherd for the special interest group of programming languages a history of logo and there are five or six of us that are involved and we're all opinionated and it's been quite a process but he's our Shepherd questions anybody right there we have Sophia Sophia so cool Imperial College thank you very much for wonderful history of this endeavor I was wondering do we have any data about what happened with the children that were taught and ideally children that were that received some other kind of tuition like intensive maths or intensive music do we have any data well there have been sick tiny little research projects what I have gotten is mostly people coming up to me saying their experience changed their lives that they decided to like the ones I'm having a reunion with these Brits they they've become computer scientists and that wasn't what they thought about doing when they were 12 but after the experience they had so I keep having people come up to me and tell me how it changed how having a logo experience changed their lives and I've also had people come up and tell me they wish it had but the kind of teaching that they experienced was not the kind of teaching we would like to see and it was more of the Pat Sufis model of you that you do this and it's there's only one way of doing things this there's a that there's a lot of interesting work that's been done by Richard nan Cecilia foils in written they got very very involved with Seymour and doing logo projects that they're math educators that were well documented hi i'm simon pegg Jones well early on in your talk simply you said something about um that one of the earliest versions of logo is to encourage children to think about thinking and I know that comes up in some of Puppets writing her but you didn't elaborate on that at all in what followed so I wondered if you could take him over just say what you had in mind that well that debugging was part of the process of getting kids or ourselves to think about thinking and the kind of debugging we experienced and did with logo was as I said anthropomorphic thinking and Seymour called it body sin tonic eventually but in the early days was anthropomorphic thinking and that is that identifying with the procedures I was I would create or the child would create and the bugs that would occur would be similar to bugs that were me and and the process of articulating what they were doing was all getting them to reflect on their own thinking and to see that it's possible to debug their thinking because they could debug these procedures hi Davis Rudy I'm with next journal over the course of your career have you seen much anecdotal difference between teaching children symbolic thinking versus physical thinking so today because the graphics are more powerful we see more blocks and snapping things together is there an advantage or disadvantage or something that's being lost by doing less symbolic thought which is you know symbols which are letters that are associated with concepts versus physical physically putting pieces together which is a unembodied experience well brings up for me the maker movement and the early maker movement people were building things and not reflecting on why they were building or what the bugs were in the process of building and things are changing with the maker movement now because it's been around a little bit and they see the flaws I think that's a big big flaw in not talking about not having a language to talk about the bugs they that are incurred in I've been working in a Center in Boston a very interesting place where there's maker stuff and I've been working with people on thinking on trying to articulate what the bugs are and that makes a big difference mark Campbell from here college national digital skills I was really interested in when you're talking about project-based learning and I think it's something that thankfully some of us are starting to come back to I think the idea of a much more integrated curriculum and learning through the bugging where it debugging is integral rather than accidental and I think that's something that we miss it where the sum of the parts is less than the whole and we really have got to go back and do an integrated curriculum in my opinion thank you I that's what I was trying to say thank you and and my emphasis like picking the interview with Marvin where he talks about being wrong Marvin would always say you can't learn without bugs and debugging so that's how I'm surprised that today that's not more in the language it was it's just part of me and part of logo that you think about bugs as positive until they're really obnoxious generic or Northeastern University at some point you mentioned in the context of MIT students that they could always ask for help if something is going wrong I wonder if you encouraged children as well to help each other or more encourage them to try and to solve the problem on their own how did you work with children on that well I've never worked with a group of children without learning something totally unexpected and totally new and all I think the point of teaching is facilitating but not just being a facilitator a teacher and with children anyway giving them some suggestions and ideas and models for what they can do try to find what I've always done is try to find what interests them and in the background work on those I mean that's what a teacher does right did you also encourage them to help each other oh yes the wonderful thing is kids teaching other kids I did a lot of that and in this Center that I hang out in sometimes there's a program called teach to learn learn to teach and they the heist there are high school students who go and teach elementary school students they're about to start it for the summer and it's always the first reaction is always they don't listen to me if they daydream in their classes yes hi I'm Richard Millwood from Trinity College Dublin Cynthia my great admiration for you starts with the fact that you were prepared back in 1966 to challenge the design of tools to throw away the brackets from Lisp to be radical in your design for children to learn and this this conference I've discovered is a lot about designing tools and perfecting them what advice would you offer to the designers of tools here to help us in education with new tools for learning now in 2019 and well one of the things this mower people are teachers and Simon has organized them to come and I think you need more of that you need not to separate developers from users and and let users help build I have a good friend who was part of a group called participatory learning and they they worked with getting children to participate and she often asked me about children in the early Lobo days and the difference in the early logo days is kids had no models for what's possible so it was not it was we didn't do things outside of the environment that we help them to work in that's it I think that's that's all we have time for but I believe Cynthia will be around a little bit after the the being that she has with the teaching folks so let's thank Cynthia for coming all the way out

Channel: Curry On!

Views: 702

Rating: 4.818182 out of 5

Keywords: CURRY ON

Id: MyF8QY2ySTA

Length: 67min 55sec (4075 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2019