Yesterday we talked about Turtle Geometry and three of the fundamental software constructs: loops, procedures and variables. It has been a good meeting.
We stressed the crucial notion that the first few instructions we have learned are those needed in Turtle Geometry and, most important, to teach Logo to kids. The instruction are:
| HOME | Send the Turtle to the center of the page |
| CLEARSCREEN | Delete all the graphics in the page |
| FORWARD 100 | Go forward by 100 points |
| RIGHT 90 | Turn right by 90 degree |
| LEFT 90 | Turn left by 90 degree |
| REPEAT 4 [
… ] |
Repeat 4 times the instructions between square brackets |
| TO SQ … END |
Encapsulate instructions between “TO name” and END in a procedure named SQ (or whatever you want to call it) |
You may learn other commands in the following but these may be useful to produce fancy graphical effects or to teach other aspects in more advanced teaching contexts, for instance at the level of secondary school when facing Cartesian geometry.
Some of you wrote me complaining for having lost the meeting. Good new: I was able to record the whole session, except the first minutes. Here you are:
Antonio asked if in LibreLogo it is possible to switch among a text code and its block-based version one. No, in LibreLogo it is not possible. Of course, you can translate by yourself a Logo text into a Scratch blocks version, as we showed in slide 6 of the first lesson.
However there are scholars that are working on this, even if they are not addressing Logo but more general programming languages. An example is that of David Weintrop and Uri Wilensky. Here you have a recent paper of them on this subject: How the Block-based, Text-based, and Hybrid Block/Text Modalities Shape Conceptual Understandings of Programming Concepts.
They offer a web interface to let people tinker with a language they wrote to work both with text and blocks code in educational contexts: pencil.cc.
We are receiving artworks, for instance from Anabela in facebook, Federica, Fatma, Lica and Sanja in the Materials space of the LearningLab, from Francesco and Anabela in the Reddit discussion space.
By the way the Reddit discussion place is getting pretty alive. We are on the right way!
I will keep trying answering promptly to every question. However, if someone is feeling I’m forgetting something, please drop me a line by email (arfATunifi.it).
We are feeling that live events work pretty well, therefore we plan other three ones: Monday 24, Wednesday 26 and Friday 28, always at 20:00.
Andreas Formiconi 
L’ha ribloggato su Il Blog di Tino Soudaz 2.0 .
Thank you for record the live event. It was a very good one and I learned a lot!
Thank you Ana!