Re: Teaching LOGO to Pre-Schoolers

["Jeff Knope" <jknope@xxxxxxxx>]

Chuck's discussion of teaching LOGO to Pre-Schoolers and his use of OKL's 
(new term for me), reminded me of  recent efforts to make a "composer" that 
enables managing a MW environment with mouseclicks only.

So I decided to try to make a little "NKL" (No Key Logo).  It seems to me 
there could be some advantages to this.  There is no need to take your eyes 
off the screen to go find a key.  There is no need to remember which keys 
stand for what action (the commands are already written out).

I have included a very short list of commands: clean, home, forward, back, 
left, right, pen up, pen down, and a thing called "go to click".

Forward and back move 20 turtle steps.  Left and right turn 30 degrees. 
These are defined in the procedure DOIT, located immediately after Startup. 
So anyone can easily change the input to any of these.  Pen up and pen down 
act as a toggle whose status is always shown.

There is also a little color picker that allows a few choices of pencolor. 
I would think that will add some excitement to the sense of control.

This "go to click" may or may not be a good idea.  It does a "setpos 
mousepos" with the next mouseclick that is anywhere in the graphics field 
above the line of commands.  There is a color change in the box that 
contains this command to indicate its readiness to do that.  The setpos is 
done with whatever pu/pd and setc status is in effect at the time of the 
click in the graphic field.  There is no need to do that click immediately 
following clicking on "go to  click."  The other commands are still active 
and can be used regardless of the status of "go to click."

"Go to click" is a fundamentally different way of managing what the turtle 
does.  Whether this is a good thing to include, I really don't know.  If you 
don't like it being there, it's easy enough to mask out.  Use some color 
other than "sky," do a freezbg (on a clean drawing field) and save it.

This is such a tiny program, I'm sending it as a Project File filetype 
rather than Compressed.  That way it's available to those of you with older 
versions of MW that don't support Compressed files.

--Jeff

P.S.:  I was surprised to discover there are no MW commands "penup" and 
"pendown."  Unlike the other commands that have both an abbreviated form and 
a long form, "pu" and "pd" are are their only versions.  This 
notwithstanding, I have shown these commands as written-out English words.



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chuck Friesen" <cfriesen@xxxxxxx>
To: <mwforum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "Chuck Friesen" <cfriesen@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2005 9:05 PM
Subject: Teaching LOGO to Pre-Schoolers


> Several observations (and experiences) in working with young children and 
> with teachers in a Logo environment:
>
> 1.  Young students are very inefficient in their keyboarding skills.
>
> a.  just to type FD 40 is an effort for some students. (remember the 
> 'space')
> b.  I prefer to minimize the "down" time of young students typing at the 
> keyboard.

Attachment: mouseOKL.mw2
Description: Binary data