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Afterwards I always told myself I'd jump in at some point and play around with Logo (since the books were freely available on his page since forever it seems) but I had forgotten about those thoughts until seeing this post right now.
To Professor Harvey :-)!
From http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ Scratch section.
What was he like in person? I've used Logo quite a lot in teaching maths and I've always wondered how bh ran his classes.
I actually learned more about his personality by reading Simply Scheme for the precursor class to CS61A (CS3) since I was a complete noob to programming at the time...his book was really fun to read though and I learned a lot that semester.
I think I ended up reading a couple of Brian's essays on his UCB page as well, which helped me gain some additional appreciation for his background.
A few years later I picked up a copy of the book Hackers (by Steven Levy) and it was there (during the section about the early days of the MIT Hackers) that I saw his name mentioned and I thought it was so cool that I had had him as an instructor :-).
I had him back in 1997 in CS61A. Will never forget that class. It was way oversubscribed due to some administrative issue. So he had the whole class on Day 1 take a test: Write a app in any language you know to solve the Tower of Hanoi (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~shidi/cs61a/wiki/Towers_of_Hano...). Whoever passed it was in the class.
It was damn intimidating. My first ever lecture in my first ever class at Berkeley, first time at a university and first time in America. I'm still a little proud I could do it back then.
Thanks for sharing!
Unplanned interventions can make it harder to present hard ideas. Quite often in maths you have to present hard stuff as a process of 'diminishing deception' or as a move from concrete things in the world through procedural routines to abstract concepts, see
http://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/staff/David.Tall/themes/how-h...
and the sample Chapter 1 for one model of that process.
I'd imagine a colleague who has a different way of unwinding the ideas jumping in part way through a presentation like that might reduce the clarity of the presentation.
Just wondering...
It's a bit rough around some edges, but http://turtleacademy.com/ is a decent site for introducing people of all ages to LOGO.
I love what a few minutes of casually messing around in LOGO can lead to: http://turtleacademy.com/program/update/53767042f4585906683c...
https://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/ch-phd.pdf
This work has been very inspirational to my own research as it introduces a concept known as live programming. The dissertation is also very well written and interesting to read even without a deep PL/HCI background.
Before that, I played around with BASIC, but was only moderately interested in programming. But as an 8 year-old seeing a set of lego blocks come to life with just a few simply commands was truly life-changing experience!
Looking at today's Mindstorm, it's just amazing how far things have come!
There are also alternative firmwares (e.g. http://www.ev3dev.org/ ) which let you use more or less the language you want, but you loose the IDE integration and the easy setup. And the original firmware is open-source too: https://github.com/mindboards/ev3sources
I owe my interest in computers to, among other people, Mr. Wizard. It wasn't frequent, but when he pulled out the old (Apple IIe maybe?) and taught kids how to write Logo, I knew I had a new mission in life.
That, and the gratuitous use of fire around children appealed my reckless grade school brain.
Now on the one hand, it taught me to RTFM, but on the other, i got stuck on something in either language and ended up quitting (drawing chairs in logo, bit shifts in C since I didn't know how binary really worked or what an exponent was). It makes me wonder what the better parenting approach is, letting your children learn to figure things out on their own, or helping them across whatever bumps they encounter, or some mix between the two.