[Its.an.education.project] why Logo failed (was: From Piaget)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

Tony,

> The best test that constructionism has had is Logo. Maybe it failed
> to scale because Logo was too hard. Maybe it failed because it was
> too foreign. It certainly seemed to fail at the level of enthusiasts
> teaching teachers who teach students. Maybe the missing element
> was ordinary teachers lack of understanding of what children
> found hard. But it could have been the tool (Logo) not being suitable.
> It could have been the system not recognising success when it
> happened.

I was able to observe many different schools trying to implement
projects based on Logo and Lego/Logo and my conclusion was that the most
critical factor that caused them to fail was that Logo was not
"discoverable". You can see what I mean if you get your hands on some
old Logos and try to use them (with an Apple II or other emulator, if
needed). Even if you are familiar with Logo in general, and perhaps even
if you used that particular Logo so many years ago, it is very unlikely
you will get very far without some external documentation.

The children were not given this external documentation, and so depended
exclusively on their teachers for every little detail they would ever
learn about the system. These teachers might not have any documentation
themselves, though sometimes they had participated in some workshop and
had some notes and at other times had a nice book. None of the teachers
I have ever met had any clue, however, and thought Logo was about making
drawings by typing terribly long strings of basic commands. So even when
they had a book they didn't see the point of the things that were taught
in it and didn't see the need to pass any of that on to the children.

http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/products/books.html

This critical issue, fortunately, doesn't have to be a problem for
current projects. Computers have enough storage to include both the
software itself and lots of examples and texts. And access to the
Internet is even better.

Another issue is one that Papert himself described repeatedly in his
books: children don't want to learn what they see adults don't care
about. So a kid in the US sees that his parents don't know any French
and are perfectly ok, while the parents of his counterpart in France use
the language everyday and so is far more motivated to learn it. Logo was
seen as something that children had to do in school but that no adults
were interested in (I would say that Brian Harvey's advanced books
flatly contradict this, but if people don't know about them then the
perception remains). Children were expected to outgrow Logo to use
Basic, Pascal, C or Java. Sadly, nearly all Logo implementations were
very weak and reinforced the idea that it was a mere toy for children.

-- Jecel