[IAEP] Sugar Labs, LOGO and Brian Harvey

[Bill Kerr]

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 9:21 AM, David Farning <dfarning at sugarlabs.org>
wrote:

> What is the status of LOGO for sugar?  Is it a high priority item?
>
> As much as LOGO I would like to bring Brian Harvey, the original author
> of BL, into the project.
>
> He has a wealth of personal experience teaching people how to program,
> he has a strong interest in LOGO, and is a good guy.
>
> Brian's page is at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/<http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/%7Ebh/>.
>
> ucbLOGO's page is at  http://sourceforge.net/projects/ucblogo/ .
>
> If Sugarizing logo is a priority we could do much worse then point new
> contributors to Brian's group to get their feet wet before diving into
> Sugar.
>
> I know neither the value of bringing LOGO into OLPC nor the cost of
> Sugarizing it to make a valid cost benefit analysis.  If some one could
> do that analysis and it seems like a good idea it will try to get the
> collaboration started.
>
> In my role as 'wiki watcher' I see quite a few people register, ask how
> they can help, and disappear when no one responds.
>
> thanks
> dfarning


I haven't been on comp.lang.logo for a while but Brian Harvey was an
amazingly knowledgeable, helpful and prolific answerer of questions on that
newsgroup - as well as the author of some very interesting papers, (on his
website)

I've always gathered there were ideological differences, politely not talked
about, between his free version of logo and Seymour's proprietary versions
which evolved into microworlds

MSW logo (George Mills Windows adaptation of Brian's Berkely logo) is very
powerful but has a clunky UI IMO, which makes it difficult for a smooth
start in classrooms, cf. MicroWorlds or Scratch (problem with Scratch is the
lack of a high ceiling) - I expect Berkely logo suffers from the same issues

A few years ago I swapped from using Logo to Game Maker for a variety of
reasons - some of which I now see as good and others as not so good

One of the good reasons was that there wasn't a particularly good free
version of logo to make a quick, easy start in the classroom, something that
classroom teachers value highly. That gap has now  been filled by Scratch,
although as I said that has other problems

Brian was also involved in an object logo which only became available on the
Mac - I don't know much about it but thought the concept was a good one
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