| This is the second volume of a three-volume series that uses
the Logo programming language as the medium for a presentation of a range of topics
in computer science. The main audience I had in mind for these books was high school
students, but it’s turned out that they have also been used in teacher training, and to
some extent by independent adult learners.
In the first edition, the first volume was a complete Logo tutorial, explaining all of
the features of the language; the second volume was entirely devoted to programming
projects. (The third volume, then and now, is a sampler of topics from undergraduate
computer science courses.) My idea was that students would spend their first year in an
intensive programming course, and would then pursue their own programming projects
on an independent study basis, using my projects as examples.
As it turned out, people found the first volume both too hard and too easy. It was
too hard because it arrived too soon at the more advanced and complicated features of
Logo; it was too easy because the actual programming examples were all short enough
to fit on a page. Such tiny examples didn’t help the learner extrapolate to the design
of a program that could actually do something interesting. This deficiency may have
encouraged some readers to conclude that Logo is just a toy, and that serious projects
should be done in a “serious” language such as Pascal or C++.
In this second edition I’ve rearranged things. The first volume now teaches only
the core features of Logo, the ones every programmer must understand; it also includes
three of the projects that were originally in the second volume. This volume is now a
more advanced programming text; it alternates tutorial chapters on advanced language
features with example projects that demonstrate those features. |
