Looking at logo July 18, 2013
Posted by mareserinitatis in computers, younger son.Tags: computers, logo, programming, younger son
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A few weeks ago, the younger son asked me what I was doing. I told him I was doing some research.
“But what are you doing?”
Fair enough. I told him I was writing a computer program, so he asked how someone does that. At that point, I was doing something in Fortran, so I wrote up a simple Hello World program and ran it. This program, however, said, “Hello, younger son.”
Since that point, he’s been asking me to teach him how to program. I suspect this comes from the fact that he’s very interested in Minecraft and wants to learn how to create mods. Unfortunately, I don’t know the first thing about that particular activity.
As you saw from my list the other day, I know several languages and software packages, but I figured most of them were not going to be terribly fascinating to a little boy whose age is still in the single digits.
Except, maybe logo.
I talked things over with Mike, and he thought logo would be good, as well, given it uses some of the math the younger son is learning and can be used to draw things.
Some folks at Berkeley have a nice (free!) logo interpreter along with some manuals on how to program in logo. I appreciate the manuals as it’s been a very long time since I’ve looked at anything pertaining to the language. I’m probably going to have to relearn everything, but I figure this will be fine as it’s something the younger boy and I can do together. I’m looking forward to it despite the fact that this probably isn’t a typical mother-son bonding activity.
I also blog at Engineer Blogs, home away from home to some of the best engineering blogs.
DC1 has been doing Scratch from MIT. We tried logo last summer but it didn’t work out (of course, last summer DC1 was 5). DH really liked Basic when he was younger.