Comment Re:Logo on an Apple II (Score 1) 623
Logo was really the basics. Around 3rd grade or so we were rocking Logo on Apple IIe computers in the computer lab. The computer lab instructors I had were mostly clueless about real programming and just handed out the assignments from the lesson plan they got somewhere. Most students spend the entire class (1 hour once or twice a week) doing the assignment, I took maybe 10 minutes, then spend the rest of the class making the project more complex (getting in to recursive sub routines & such). By the time I got to Junior High (aka Middle School now) we were doing far more complex logo on the Mac LCII's (if I remember right). I had fully animated scenes (boats rowing away from sharks as the sun set) and basic music scores (simple two tone JAWS stuff, with some munching at the end). From there we had a couple Pascal (Lightspeed Pascal as I remember) classes and the teacher was fabulous. The teacher was really smart, not a total computer geek but smart enough to 1) keep up with us geeks and 2) smart enough to let us loose on some projects that far exceeded the class curriculum. Those were really the launching points for me. After that there were college programming courses but I was already teaching myself programming languages and had a job as an application developer. So much of what I learned I taught myself, but I had great "teachers" along the way that weren't afraid to just set me free and give me the tools to teach myself (sometimes far beyond their levels of programming competency).