40 years ago Logo was created. When I was at MIT in the 1980’s, I worked for a semester as a UROP (undergraduate research opportunities program) in Seymour Papert’s lab. The Coleco Adam had just come out and was going to revolutionize the world of home computing with a variety of features, including a version of Logo the lab I was in was porting to it. Anyone remember the Coleco Adam?
Recently, the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab released (or at least publicized ) Scratch. After playing around with it for a little while this morning, it’s obvious to see Scratch’s roots in Logo. However, the creators of Scratch have also built an underlying social network for all Scratch programmers / programs / users. This is the hidden power – within five minutes of exploring I started to find all kinds of interesting programs that I could look at that helped me learn how Scratch worked. In addition, all the normal social network things applied (e.g. in “My Stuff” I have friends, requests, galleries, projects, and favorites.)
Learning how to program is hard. I learned on an Apple II in Basic and 6502 machine language. That impacted how my brain is wired since I was 13 at the time. Today, when I look at something like Scratch, I can see how the next generation of computer scientists (who are < 10 right now) are going to think about software completely differently than me. That’s good.