The British Logo User Group (Logos) has disbanded. The reason for this was the impossibility of supporting Logo as a language for use by children. In the UK the focus has been on the turtle and turtle graphics. The

Committee of Logos, following developments after WCCE'95 (World Conference on Computers in Education held in Birmingham in July 1995. EUROLOGO'95 took place in association with it. ) felt that a new direction was required. The essentials of the approach we propose is in a statement on the web site www.logios.org.

It is our contention that the computer must generate a "change of state" in education and that, from the roots provided by Logo, we must now develop a new pedagogy suited to the new medium. Like children growing
into adults, we need to cast off ideas formed in the pedagogy of spoken and written language. We now need to develop a padagogy suited to a medium capable of representing action (rules, verbs, operations, etc.). The
logical thinking required to use the medium of mind and pen now needs to be supplanted by logios (*) thinking suited to a medium which can carry out logical operations for us.

 

This is the most massive change in the medium of instruction since the ancients painted their scenes on the walls of the caves at Lascaux. The challenge for educationalists is the greatest they will ever face. We need
now to put to one side the Logo philosophy, rooted as it is in Piaget's theories for the prior medium, and to begin to work out how we might best help children to harness the new power they have. This will be very difficult because, by definition, they will have fewer misconceptions than do we. It follows, that we will have to learn from the children. Hence, all changes in children's performance, eg boy's poorer reading performance, need to be examined for their relationship to computer media.

Why Logo? Because the simplest Logo instruction: forward 50, incorporates the essential of the new medium - the capability of representing actions actively. Logo is at the heart of this work. It is work9ing with Logo and
seeing the failure of traditional education to use the language effectively that catalysed the work I have done. I still see Logo (or something very like it) as an essential element in a post-literary school curriculum.