Clayton's Conference - 1984

The Claytons Logo Conference

Tony Adams and Liddy Nevile

Logo84, the recent Logo conference held at the Massachusetts Institute cf Technology in Boston, was the oonference you have when you are not having a conference. Originally conceived as an "in-group" affair for 60 or 7C experts it attracted 500 delegates without a single shred of advertising or promotion. Included were researchers and teachers from 20 countries, 8? of these from Australia, making it the first truly international Logo conference. The 3 Aussies included 7 from Victoria and 1 from Queensland and were made up of teachers, teacher educators, computer science educators, and cognitive development researchers. Not one single person from the Schools Commission committees or from the various state decision-making structures was present. Sure the conference wasn't well advertised but those that went either got very quick assistance from their institutions, or put up their own dollars to go. They at least thought it was important enough.

It was appropriate that Logo84 was staged at MIT, the home of the research and development work that produced Logo, because the conference also attracted the major figures involved in this work. Seymour Papert, whose book "Mindstorms" popularised the use of Logo was very much in attendance, and surprisingly to many, in proposing to take a leading role in future coordination of international conferences and journals. Cynthia Solomon, Dan Watt, John Harvey, Hal Abelson, Sylvia Weir, Andrea diSessa, Margaret Minsky, Danny Hillis, Alan Kay, David Thornburg and Paul Goldenberg are all names familiar to those involved with Logo work in this country. The major question that the conference answered was one which many people ask, "what comes after Logo". The answer was quite obvious from the conference and exhibition, Logo comes after Logo.

There was a dynamism present. The conference participants not only met to discuss the successes of Logo, but also the often very obvious limitations. They were keen to know where Logo belongs in the educational world and how Logo could best be used in the classroom. Other major issues which stood out were the future trends in Logo software to take advantage of new more powerful hardware features and, how could the role of Logo best be evaluated.

Papert opened the conference and highlighted the "evaluation" debate that lasted throughout. He talked about the early logo experiences, and how the scarcity of computers was often responsible for the teacher-centredness of Logo activities. He suggested that unless doing Logo becomes truly child centred, children will not experience its power. Papert pointed out that one of the advantages of having more computers is that the teacher is more likely to lose control over the children, and so the children will be freer to use the computers for their own interests and at their own pace. He pointed out that Logo was not likely to be effective outside of a supporting Logo culture. Richard Noss a researcher and teacher from the UK pointed out that if Logo was going to be successful we would have to heed the words of Lenin, Two factors were important in any Logo revolution, Noss said, Logo would have to be an organisational force to be wielded against the establishment, and we would have to aim for the realization by the overwhelming majority that they can't go on as before. The important thing was not the Logo culture, Noss said, but that Logo was part of a learning culture in education.

Recent reesearch findings by James Milojkovio of Stanford University (an expatriate Australian) and Roy Pea of Bank Street College in New York have been used to "blast" the evidence that Logo is a useful tool for education. The conference clearly showed that this is more of an argument over research methodologies than an argument for whether Logo is good or bad. Pea's research using traditional statistical techniques had shown that after using Logo children did not become better planners. Papert pointed out that the children who were naturally good planners would not benefit from Logo in this area, and the children who weren’t would continue to be bad planners.

Papert said that after Mindstorms was published that he received many letters from people who said that at last they felt that their non-planning approach was legitimate, after years of seeing themselves as failures. Boh Pea and Milojkovic stressed their support for Logo despite the reputation they have for suggesting that Logo has not been proven to be of intrinsic cognitive benefit in the areas researched.

Dan Watt, an ex teacher involved in the MIT Logo evaluations in the late 70's talked about "Logo myths". The first of these, he said was that "Logo was easy". Watt said that Logo was certainly easier to start out with than other languages, but that "if we try to sell Logo as easy we will have a lot of frustrated people because Logo is not all easy", Another myth he said was that "Logo should be totally child initiated". This denies the fact he said that children have to be taught Logo if they are going to use it in a child centred manner.

The third myth he said, was that "Logo is good for you". "We don't
know what is happening, how to recognise it, what is good...We don't know how good some of the other things computers can be used for will be", Watt said.

The use of Logo to teach programming concepts was a theme explored by a number of speakers. Brian Harvey categorised computer languages into three areas. "The do-it-right" languages Pascal and Ada, "programming as a means of exploring ideas", Logo, Lisp, Smalltalk and Prolog, and languages for "hacking your way through, Basic, Fortran and Cobol. Hal Abelson, a visitor to Australia earlier this year, said that he often heard that "Logo is a children's starting language, and that when the right progress is made they will advance to such real languages as Pascal. The power of Logo is not often appreciated he said. Abelson, the conference chairman was standing in for John Allen, author of an excellent advanced Logo text "Thinking about Logo" and developer of TLC Logo, a very Lisp like Logo running under CP/M. Allen is an outspoken critic of some current Logo implementations,

be that many of the better features of Lisp have been discarded. Notable of these he says, is that some Logo primitives have been given a second class status because they do not return results to a. calling procedure. Abelson quoted the absent Allen who made a profound statement about computer languages. Allen said, "Basic is the Acne of computer science, butt Pascal is the staph infection."

Abelson conclude with a warning that if leona Logo is learnt by students teer. computer science in secondary school, tertiary educators will need to only "Dive them a little Clearasil, not penicillin".

Andrea diSessa looked at extensions to Logo in the future, He saw that a major difference between now and the 60's was that the computer is spreading throughout the society. He said that educators had a big jump on others in spreading ideas on how "this artifact" will be used. If this is to become a learning age, diSessa said, "then we have a head start in determining what the learning age is going to be like". He said that we must use our energies to generate understandable artifacts that are useful to the user and carry powerful ideas. The meaning of programming is going to change, this included: changes to the screen, for example the screen becoming more concrete! the form of programming, for example Logic programming; and the activities that you are involved in. Boxer he said is an example of a language of the future. It is under development at MIT and has taken steps in the three areas diSessa said.

Several speakers outlined some of the work that was done at Atari Research before it was wound up. This included qLogo a language which marries the "object programming" ideas of Smalltalk with Logo. Other developments were "intelligent music composers" and the choreography of marrionettes using Logo.

A stunning example of games developments at Atari Research was given by Danny Hillis. He talked of multiple sensory modarity - computers which give feedback and take information through a number of different human senses. The idea of a joystick or steering wheel returning direct pressure to the user and a glove by which the user could feel aspects of the computer program were examples, he said.

Papert closed the conference and announced that a large international Logo conference would be organised in the winter (USA) of 1985, or early 1996.

In his closing remarks he looked at the differences between teaching computing and areas of maths such as set theory. "If the teacher botches set theory nothing goes across. If the computer is out there no matter however much the teacher botches it, the child has the
possibility of re-appropriating because you put your hands on the computer and you can find out what will make it do something".

Danny Hillis told a story that showed just how much things have changed. He met a neighbourhood child outside MIT who asked what went on inside MIT. He had attempted to describe as best he could in simple way about turtles, and computers, and music, and other exciting things, but the child continued to look really bored and after a while said, "that just sounds like Logo". That’s how things have changed Hillis said.