[MWForum]Logo success story

[Wendy Petti]

Hi Folks,

My request for you to share Logo success stories has been met with prolonged
silence!  So I'll start us off by sharing a little anecdote, and I hope lots
of you will contribute your own stories.  Susan of LCSI is collecting the
stories, and I think we'd all appreciate hearing them - even just a few
sentences to tell us what is worth celebrating as a teacher or learner of
MicroWorlds / Logo.

Here's a moment I've always enjoyed replaying:

One year I was coordinating a MicroWorlds project with two third-grade
classes who had been learning about Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" through a
story version of the play.  The teacher wanted the students to create their
own version of Twelfth Night with MicroWorlds, including animated scenes and
voice recordings.  Each pair of students developed one of the animated
scenes: drawing the characters and backgrounds and writing the code to
animate the characters.  For instance, Sangeeta and her partner had animated
a small scene of Malvolio opening a door to a mansion, walking down a path
(becoming larger as he moved), picking up an envelope, opening it, and
reading the letter inside.  The full text of the letter was displayed on
another page of the project; in the story, it had been written as a prank to
make the haughty Malvolio begin to act foolishly around the woman he loved.

In the midst of this project, the school had a ski day at a small ski
resort.  Late in the day, I happened to ski past Sangeeta and some of her
friends.  She called out in surprise, "Mrs. Petti, I didn't know you could
ski!"  A moment later she said in delight, "Why, we could make Malvolio ski
down the path to pick up the letter!"

It was just a quick moment on a ski slope, but I was tickled.  Sangeeta was
sufficiently invested in the project and empowered by MicroWorlds to be
brainstorming a fun variation in the middle of a ski slope!  I could hardly
imagine that she would have shouted out story ideas to her English teacher
or math story problems to her math teacher.  My students had been delighted
to see their cartoon-like characters come to life with a few lines of Logo
code.  They had not seemed to mind tweaking the code endlessly to get their
characters to behave exactly as they intended.  They were creating their own
microworlds, and they loved being in control of these little worlds.

This is why MicroWorlds is my favorite software and my favorite Logo.  Some
people prefer "pure" versions of Logo without the multimedia features that
can distract kids from the programming language.  I say it depends on our
ultimate purpose.  Is our main purpose to teach the programming language, or
is the programming language a means to an end?  I think the experience will
be more meaningful and enduring if the programming component is a means to
an end and if the student is highly invested in the outcome.  If the extra
features help the student develop a new world more fully and easily, that's
great!

I think  the student's mindset is more important than the particular bits of
code that might or might not be mastered.  I knew on the ski slope that
Sangeeta "got it" and that she was beginning to think like me:  the world is
full of possibilities, just waiting to be turned into fun new MicroWorlds
projects!

Wendy Petti

Director of Curriculum, OpenWorld Learning
and OWL's MicroWorlds in Action
http://mia.openworldlearning.org
Math Cats
http://www.mathcats.com