Logo (60's) and its precedents

Papert’s pioneering work on Logo has become the ancestor of all other programming environments for children and certainly one of the earliest programming languages designed for children. It became an influential programming language and was used to gain a better understanding of real-world phenomena. The use of turtle-graphics was added to provide a mathematical microworld fun to explore. It was said that the turtle-geometry is a computational style of geometry. However, since Logo was a completely text-based language with procedures either typed at a command line or entered into an editor. Children had difficulties in typing the commands and difficulties in orientation (confusing between left and right). Consequently, Logo needed to be redesigned and yet, the idea of children programming is no longer restricted to a textual interface.

A simple improvement was LogoWriter (1980) that allows children to create turtle-graphic procedures by converting mouse drags into turn and more command. Later, researchers developed visual representation features in enhancing the performance of the earlier Logo.

Boxer (1986), for example, provides simulation parameters in microworld on a high level of interfaces with sliders, buttons and number entries to control those parameters. Others advancement from Logo, LogoWriter and Boxer are MultiLogo (1991) and Microworld (1992).

StarLogo (1994) is a programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems — systems that are organized without an organizer, coordinated without a coordinator. With StarLogo, you can model (and gain insights into) many real-life phenomena, such as bird flocks, traffic jams, ant colonies, and market economies.

Elica (2000) is a modern Logo dialect that provides a cohesive link between procedural, functional and object-oriented styles of programming through a small yet elegant Logo core. The main difference at first sight is that Elica can do 3D graphics in real-time.