[MWForum]Logo success story

[Gary McCallister]

Here is another, only  a personal story about myself.
     I am a college teacher of Biology with some responsibilities in science
education.  I first learned to do Logo at a one week immersion workshop in St.
Paul, MN from Michael Temple.  I stayed in a hotel downtown and walked to the
elementary school each day which was several miles away.  After working for 8
hours in Logo, I would walk home with my mind spinning and think about what was
going on.  I had come as an experiment to see if Logo would work for some things
I was trying to do, both in Biology (my field) and educationally.  I knew
something exciting and powerful was going on but I could not quite put my finger
on it until the last morning as I was walking to the workshop.
     As a Biologist and scientist I had done my fair share of scientific
research.  In this you would get an idea, conduct an experiment to test your
idea.  In biology this can sometimes involve at least several days, and sometime
several months.  Then one analyzes the data, refines their ideas or experimental
design and does another set of experiments.  This is sort of an endless
iteration hopefully spiraling into greater knowledge.
     What suddenly struck me was that in this workshop I was doing science in a
greatly compressed time frame.  I would get an idea and type in a program and
run an experiment.  I t most often went badly and I would examine the outcome,
revise my thinking and type in another, modified program.  Then run the program
with the click of a button and gather more data.  It was compressing perhaps 50
experiments in the course of an hour with feedback each time instead of 50
experiments in the course of a year.  
     Scientific research is an intensely exciting thing to do and an exciting
way to learn that most people don't get to experience in such a concentrated way
because of the time involved.  When suing Logo, I can do scientific research at
a tremendously compressed rate and the result can almost be euphoria.  Most
people who have not had the experience of doing research do not understand that
this is the intellectual excitement they feel when they do Logo, they just know
it is exciting.  But when I point this out to students, or whenever I point it
out to college professors who try this language, they immediately see the
concept and are excited.  I believe it has to be taught to students, but it is
one of the unrecognized values of the Logo language.