Logo Programming Research Articles

Application of Neural Networks for Evaluation of Classroom Instruction in the Learning of Logo Programming by Junior High School Students

Application of Neural Networks for Evaluation of Classroom Instruction in the Learning of Logo Programming by Junior High School Students

The impact of LOGO on gifted children's achievement and creativity

It was hypothesised that problem solving via the Arabic logo programming environment would enhance gifted children's mathematics achievement and their creativity as measured by their performance on Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) and Mathematical Skills Assessment (MSA). The study findings extend previous research by indicating that problem solving via the LOGO programming environment can enhance mathematics achievement and creativity in figural, as well as verbal, domains. The evaluation of a large number of previous studies on the enhancement of creativity concluded that many of these studies have a positive effect. An implication is that computer environments may offer appropriate special provisions to meet the special needs of gifted children. In addition, this experiment provided some evidence that if gifted children work in pairs the need for teacher intervention to motivate the children is decreased. Also, if gifted children choose their own goals this increases their motivation and task commitment but might also restrict the range of mathematical ideas used.

A Cybernetic Approach to Study the Learnability of the Logo Turtle World

Research has demonstrated that children experience great difficulty in gaining mastery of the syntax and the semantic structure of the LOGO programming environment. The study presented in this article tests the hypothesis that simplification of the semantic structure will facilitate semantic understanding and acquisition of syntax knowledge within the LOGO Turtle World. Two microworlds were designed to carry out the same class of tasks using an identical set of basic commands, but comprising a different semantic structure. They were designed applying the theory of automata and abstract languages. The article demonstrates that different formal grammars can be formulated from one set of terminal symbols (i.e., basic commands of the LOGO Turtle World). Furthermore, it demonstrates how different finite-state machines correspond with these different grammars. In this study, two finite-state machines are defined: a one-state machine (ORTHO-1) and a four-state machine (ORTHO-4). Both machines can produce analogous rectangular figures in response to sequences of input symbols chosen from an identical input alphabet. Each of these abstract machines was physically realized as a computer-based microworld similar to the LOGO Turtle World. In an experiment with second and third grade children, it was found that the semantically simpler microworld (i.e., ORTHO-1) produced better semantic understanding as well as better mastery of the syntax of the input commands. The result occurred despite the fact that these microworlds used identical input commands.

The Effect of Hypermedia Authoring on Elementary School Students' Creative Thinking

Promoting creative thinking in children has been an issue of critical importance to educators. Research shows that appropriate uses of computer programs such as word processing, computer imaging, and Logo programming have the potential to enhance children's creativity. Little is known, however, about the impact of hypermedia technology on children's creative thinking. This study examined whether engaging elementary school students in hypermedia authoring would promote their creative thinking. It was found that after engaging in an extended period of hypermedia authoring, the fourth graders increased their creativity scores in a number of areas. The low and intermediate ability students appeared to benefit from the hypermedia authoring environment more than the high ability students and working collaboratively on the hypermedia authoring projects enabled students to demonstrate higher creativity scores than when working individually. The findings are consistent with research on hypermedia and creativity with Logo in showing that by offering a new dimension for expressing thoughts and encouraging novel ways of presentation, hypermedia authoring is another way to facilitate children's cognitive development and promote their motivation toward learning.

Guided Instruction in Logo Programming and the Development of Cognitive Monitoring Strategies among College Students

This research examined whether an approach to teaching Logo programming that directly guided the student in the use of cognitive monitoring skills and the transfer of those skills would lead to increased cognitive monitoring and problem-solving skills. For this study, college students received either a guided approach to teaching Logo or a more traditional discovery approach. The results of this study demonstrated that guided instruction in Logo led to increased comprehension monitoring on both near transfer and far transfer tasks. Guided instruction in Logo programming also contributed to the development of Logo error identification and debugging skills.

ToonTalk TM—An Animated Programming Environment for Children

Seymour Papert once described the design of the Logo programming language as taking the best ideas in computer science about programming language design and ‘child engineering’ them. Twenty-five years after Logo's birth, there has been tremendous progress in programming language research and in computer-human interfaces. Programming languages exist now that are very expressive and mathematically very elegant and yet are difficult to learn and master. We believe the time is now ripe to attempt to repeat the success of the designers of Logo by child engineering one of these modern languages. When Logo was first built, a critical aspect was taking the computational constructs of the Lisp programming language and designing a child friendly syntax for them. Lisp's ‘CAR ’ was replaced by ‘FIRST’, ‘DEFUN’ by ‘TO’, parentheses were eliminated, and so on. Today there are totally visual languages in which programs exist as pictures and not as text. We believe this is a step in the right direction, but even better than visual programs are animated programs.Animation is much better suited for dealing with the dynamics of computer programs than static icons or diagrams. While there has been substantial progress in graphical user interfaces in the last twenty-five years, we chose to look not primarily at the desktop metaphor for ideas but instead at video games. Video games are typically more direct, more concrete, and easier to learn than other software. And more fun too. We have constructed a general-purpose concurrent programming system, ToonTalk, in which the source code is animated and the programming environment is a video game. Every abstract computational aspect is mapped into a concrete metaphor. For example, a computation is a city, an active object or agent is a house, birds carry messages between houses, a method or clause is a robot trained by the user and so on. The programmer controls a ‘programmer persona’ in this video world to construct, run, debug and modify programs. We believe that ToonTalk is especially well suited for giving children the opportunity to build real programs in a manner that is easy to learn and fun to do.

Design of a logo environment for elementary geometry

One rationale for Logo programming is that students will learn geometry for utilizing concepts that aid them in understanding and directing the Logo turtle's movements. Research on this claim has yielded mixed results; however, an analysis of these research findings provides significant guidance in the teaching and learning of geometry with Logo. This article (a) reviews the body of research that led to the design of a new Logo environments tailored for elementary students' learning of geometry; (b) describes this environment, Geo-Logo, and its connections to this research corpus; and (c) presents empirical data from the first field test of the environment, which generally support the efficacy of the design.

A Cognitive Processing Account of Individual Differences in Novice Logo Programmers' Conceptualisation and Use of Recursion

This article describes a study which investigated individual differences in the construction of mental models of recursion in Logo programming. It was hypothesized that differences in individuals' cognitive profiles would be reflected in differences in their computer programming problem solving behavior. The learning process was investigated from the perspective of Norman's mental models theory and employed diSessa's ontology regarding distributed, functional, and surrogate mental models. Analysis of the processes underlying mental model construction and of individual differences in these processes was based on the Luria model of brain function with particular regard to the relative contribution of simultaneous and successive cognitive processing abilities to conscious mental activity. Results generally confirmed predictions regarding the involvement of these abilities in the manifestation of individual differences in the stages of conscious mental activity contributing to the progressive development of mental models of recursion.

Benefits of Teaching Design Skills before Teaching Logo Computer Programming: Evidence for Syntax-Independent Learning

We compared two groups of twenty computer-naive college students as they received instruction and practice in writing Logo programs. The design group received pretraining in general design principles such as modularity (breaking a procedure into parts) and reusability (using the same subprocedure more than once) presented in English whereas the no-design group did not. On programming assignments during Logo learning, the design group generated more revision cycles, more test runs, more syntax errors, and more input lines than the no-design group; and the design group wrote final programs that were shorter, more modular, more efficient, and more flexible than the no-design group. However, the groups generally did not differ on cognitive tests such spatial cognition, instruction comprehension, and planning. These results are consistent with Dyck and Mayer's syntax-independent access theory—planning skills for programming can be learned independently of the syntax of the programming language [1].

The Effectiveness of Computer Applications

AbstractA meta-analysis of 36 independent studies showed that computer applications have a positive effect on students’ academic achievement from elementary school to college. The average effect size from 151 comparisons was .38; this indicates that use of computer applications raised students’ examination scores by .38 standard deviation. Effects differed as a function of the computer study feature. Effect sizes were higher in studies that used Logo programming language, when different teachers taught the experimental and the control group, when treatment was applied in a period of one to two months, and when subjects were selected from high schools.

Cognition of Fundamental Concepts in Geometry

The purposes of this study were: 1) to investigate the effects of Logo Based Instruction (LBI) for the cognition of the four fundamental concepts in geometry, and 2) to explore the possibility of integrating the Logo programming language in the geometry curriculum. The regular classroom teacher taught both the experimental and control groups following the treatment plan designed by the researcher. Interviews of sixteen seventh and eighth graders from each group were audio taped. The results showed that the students in the experimental group had a deeper conceptualization of fundamental concepts in geometry. An ANCOVA test applied to the scores of Interview Sheets, and the t-test applied to the gain in van Hiele levels, were significant in favor of the experimental group. These results are encouraging and support the integration of Logo in the geometry curriculum.

The Effect of Logo on the Nonverbal Reasoning Ability of Rural and Disadvantaged Third Graders

AbstractPrior research that has attempted to assess the impact of Logo programming on the cognitive abilities of youth has utilized samples drawn primarily from white middle class populations. This study assesses the impact of Logo programming using a sample that consists of rural and disadvantaged student’s. Thirty-six third-graders were randomly assigned to either a treatment group or a control group. The Matrix Analogies Test, a test of nonverbal reasoning ability, was selected as the dependent variable. The treatment group received eight weeks of Logo programming experience. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) computed on the MAT posttest, controlling for pretest, revealed a significant group effect. The Logo group scored significantly higher than the control group.

Empowering language-impaired children through Logo

The Logo programming language can be a useful tool for speech- language therapists working with language-impaired children. It can be used to develop children's assertiveness, spatial/directional skills and higher level language skills such as logical sequencing and cause and effect. The philosophy which underpins Logo facilitates an environment which empowers language-impaired children.

Situated programming in a legologo environment

The purpose of the present study was to promote the mediation of the thinking skills and heuristic processes of an expert working in a complex technology environment. The object of learning was an automatic washing machine, the structure and functions of which were simulated by the means of LEGOTCLogo. In order to organize the learning process, cognitive apprenticeship and the constructivist conception of learning were applied. The 10-h project attempted to enable the students to learn planning skills, and, in order to evaluate the development of these skills, the implementation of the students' plans into Logo programs was analyzed. The criteria were the hierarchies of Logo programs and the number of nodes in each program. In addition, the progress of four groups of students was analyzed from real time video material, gathered by on line-techniques. It was concluded that cognitive apprenticeship, connected to the externalization and development of the students' own theories and conceptions, was able to support the mediation of planning skills and include them in the student's own actions. Following the 10-h project the programs of the students were relatively complex and organized; they even modeled satisfactorily the functions of an actual auto servo mechanism.

Empowering a society of future users of information technology: a longitudinal study of an application in early education

This paper presents a six-year study of the use of computers in a Greek primary school, based on the premise that, in contrast to current technocentric views regarding the use of information technology in the Greek educational system, computers can be used as tools for self-enhancement. The aim of the school project was to infuse a child-centred pedagogy, through the learning of Logo programming, into the whole of the school's society, i.e. all children and all teachers. Within this context, we have identified and explored how children may learn programming through a process of forming ‘naive’ or locally applicable theorems concerning key programming ideas such as the use of primitives, structuring a problem by means of writing procedures, and constructing and working with generalised notional objects by means of defining procedures with variable inputs. We discuss the emerging interrelated educational and technological aspects concerning this kind of learning, and then set these against the challenge to exploit the developing technology further in order to design expressive media of increasing flexibility and power, and to focus on specific learning domains.

Connecting theory and practice: Results from the teaching of Logo

This paper is concerned with pupils' learning of the concept of variable in the Logo programming environment and how this relates to teaching. Results from three research projects are described and compared in a discussion of how improvements in learning have been influenced by a refinement in teaching method. This refinement has been influenced, in part, by the theories of Vygotsky. Within this paper, details of the changes in teaching approach are described together with a discussion of the effects of these changes. The main conclusion drawn is that in mathematics education we need to make more explicit the underlying theories influencing our work, because these theories influence both the ways in which we work in the classroom and the ways in which we analyse our data.

Knowledge‐Based Instruction: Teaching Problem Solving In a Logo Learning Environment

Abstract Three studies are reported which collectively show that five particular problem‐solving strategies can be developed in students explicitly taught those strategies and given practice applying them to solve Logo programming problems. The studies demonstrate the superiority of such intervention over Logo programming practice alone, explicit strategy training with non‐computer‐based practice, and instruction in content areas traditionally prescribed for the teaching and learning of problem solving. The results indicate that problem‐solving strategies will not be developed through Logo programming alone, rather they must be explicitly taught and practiced. Knowledge‐based instruction linking declarative and procedural knowledge is recommended as a means to this end.

Understanding average speed: a study on students aged 11 to 12 years

This article presents research aimed at designing a strategy to help students aged 11 to 12 years understand the concept of speed. In our approach the work of students is based on experimental activities integrated with Logo programming.

Logo Mastery and Spatial Problem-Solving by Young Children: Effects of Logo Language Training, Route-Strategy Training, and Learning Styles on Immediate Learning and Transfer

This study examines children's abilities 1) to learn to program with a single keystroke, ten command Logo system enabling them to produce multiple command sequences to solve on-screen problems, 2) to learn two new strategies (direct and indirect route strategies) requiring the use of two levels of programming difficulty measured via average times, keystrokes, and errors, 3) to transfer screen-based Logo training to the solution of spatial problems in another learning setting, and 4) to demonstrate whether there are any individual differences in the effectiveness of Logo learning for children who have different learning orientations (field independent versus field dependent and/or reflective versus impulsive). Twenty-four four- and five-year-old children served as subjects in the study. Data from the study showed: 1) that mastery of the Logo language is not a necessary condition for young children to think and problem-solve within a Logo environment, 2) that successful problem-solving within a Logo environment is predicated on a child's use of an age-appropriate Logo programming system, 3) that even very young children can be taught spatial-conceptual strategies with which to operate within a Logo environment, 4) that young children can transfer Logo-environment knowledge to other problem-solving settings, and 5) that field independent children seem to have a slight advantage both in their initial learning of Logo and in their transfer of Logo learning to another problem-solving setting. Some of the present results are interpreted according to Watson and Busch's model of the development of Logo programming and problem-solving skills in children [1].

The Influence of Student Computer-Ownership and in-Home Use on Achievement in an Elementary School Computer Programming Curriculum

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of home computer ownership and use on achievement. Ninety-six second graders and seventy-nine fifth graders were taught BASIC programming with homework for three marking periods, and Logo programming without homework for one marking period. Pretests were given in both BASIC and Logo. Posttests were administered at the end of BASIC and Logo instruction. Questionnaires were issued to assess computer use in homework completion. Students were grouped by ability, sex, and computer ownership. Posttest scores for BASIC and Logo and BASIC homework score averages were analyzed using ANOVA and ANCOVA (with pretest scores as the covariate). Fifth grade computer owners had significantly ( p = .02) higher mean homework scores than nonowners. Among high ability fifth graders, owners outperformed the nonowners on both BASIC and Logo posttest scores. Computer use in homework assignments was not as important to achievement as ownership.