Learning how to program - Retro programming with LOGO on a BBC Micro

Are you a programmer? Are you learning how to be one? Come to think of it, how do you even learn how to think like a programmer? There's more to programming than typing in lines of code after all.

Back in the 80s people had ideas on how best to teach programming and while most focused on learning a language there were a few who went a bit deeper and tried to understand how to teach what we now call "computational thinking" - how to think up algorithms in the first place.

Come with me as I play around using LOGO on my BBC Micro, following some things from Seymour Papert's Mindstorms book, as I explain how I use LOGO today to help teach kids how to become programmers and computer scientists.

There are a lot of videos on how to program, or how to learn Python for example. They all mostly focus on how to work through a series of exercises to learn a particular language's syntax and this is great if you do want to learn Python or JavaScript. They don't always go into ways to think for yourself - how to decompose a problem into parts, or how to structure an algorithm.

Read the Mindstorms book yourself online - https://mindstorms.media.mit.edu/

Try LOGO in your browser - https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/turtle-snowflakes

Blog Post - https://ncot.uk/compsci/logo-mindstorms-learning-how-to-program/ Website - https://ncot.uk Ko-Fi - https://ko-fi.com/ncot_tech ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gSwllpDFgM