Logo Resources

In 1967, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon, Wally Feurzeig created the first programing language for children, Logo. This page curates a growing collection of resources related to learning more about Logo and how to teach it.

History of Logo paper
Solomon, C., Harvey, B., Kahn, K., Lieberman, H., Miller, M. L., Minsky, M., Papert, A., & Silverman, B. (2020). History of Logo. Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, 4(HOPL), 1-66. 

What is Logo? And Who Needs It? by Seymour Papert
A brief 1999 essay by Seymour Papert in which he describes Logo, its origins, and its role in the educational technology landscape. Read it here.

Video discussion of Logo history
Dr. Cynthia Solomon and Dr. Wally Feurzig were interviewed by Dr. Celia Hoyles and Dr. Gary Stager at the Constructionism 2010 Conference, August 2010 in Paris, France.

Logo history Interview from Gary Stager on Vimeo.

Twenty Things to Do with a Computer
The seminal 1971 paper authored by Seymour Papert & Cynthia Solomon

Cynthia Solomon’s LogoThings web site
Lots of historic artifacts and resources curated by the mother of educational computing and co-creator of Logo, Dr. Cynthia Solomon

Twenty Things to Do with a Computer Forward 50: Future Visions of Education Inspired by Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon’s Seminal Work
A new (2021) book collecting four dozen essays by leading thinkers and educators about the past, present, and future of education.

Logo Philosophy and Implementation
A 1999 book published by Logo Computer Systems, Inc., featuring essays by leading educators about Logo use around the world.

21st Century skills suggest that teachers should be able to read, understand, generalize, and apply the principles of these seminal texts to contemporary contexts. Reach out if you need assistance.

Modern Logo Dialects and Descendants

Turtle Art
Turtle Art is a wonderful web-based turtle graphics environment for turning mathematical ideas into beautiful art. It may be the most welcoming context for introducing the powerful ideas inherent in Logo programming to teachers and students. This page includes links to resources for using Turtle Art with learners of all ages.

Lynx is a web-based Logo dialect, complete with multiple turtles, parallelism, multimedia, and online sharing.

The Invent To Learn Guide to Block Programming
A curated collection of links to Logo-like environments and related resources post-2020. Turtle Art, Lynx, Snap!, Scratch, MakeCode, microBlocks, and more are detailed here.

The Logo Exchange

Logo Exchange Archives (1982 – 1999) 
Links to the complete archive of Logo Exchange journal issues for 17 years.

If you’re interested in Logo, you’ll love Constructing Modern Knowledge! Click for info

Logo at MIT

MIT Logo Memos 
A collection of research papers from the MIT Artificial Intelligence and Logo Groups, 1971 – 1981

MIT Logo Conference Proceedings
MIT hosted legendary Logo conferences during the summers of 1984-1986. Here are the proceedings.

East Coast Logo Conference Proceedings

A Logo Conference, organized by Tom Lough, founder/publisher of Logo Exchange and Glen Bull of the University of Virginia, was held in Crystal City, Virginia (Washington D.C.) in April, 1987.

EuroLogo and Constructionism Conference Proceedings

The biannual Constructionism Conference is an international gathering of academics and practitioners interested in Papert’s theory of constructionism. The Constructionism Conference is the successor to the EuroLogo Conference which ran every two years from the 1980s until 2007.

Classic Books

LogoWorks: Challenging Programs in Logo 
A complete book of challenging Logo programming projects by Cynthia Solomon, Margaret Minsky and Brian Harvey in PDF form

Download PDF

Computer Science Logo Style by Brian Harvey
Veteran computer science educator and co-creator of Snap!, Dr. Brian Harvey, published three seminal books about computer science taught in a Logo environment. These three volumes constitute a thorough computer science education, at least for non-computer science majors. These texts are available for free online in HTML and PDF form.

Teaching with Logo
There were no bigger stars in educational computing in the 1980s than Dan and Molly Lynn Watt. Their 1986 book, Teaching with Logo: Building Blocks in Learning, is a model of progressive pedagogical practices in a modern computational context.

Download book

Turtle Confusion and Turtle Speaks Mathematics by Barry Newell
Dr. Barry Newell, is an astrophysicist who was was the Administrator (in the NASA sense) of Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories of the Australian National University. He now works on the dynamics of social-ecological systems.

Download the books here

In his spare time (back in 1988), Newell wrote two classic books on Logo programming and mathematics, Turtle Confusion and the accompanying book for educators, Turtles Speak Mathematics. Turtle Confusion features 40 challenging turtle geometry puzzles in a mystery format and Turtles Speak Mathematics helps educators understand the mathematics their students are learning.

Exploring Language with Logo by E. Paul Goldenberg & Wallace Feurzeig
Exploring Language with Logo uses the underutilized word and list processing functionality of Logo to “mess about” with phonetics, grammar, poetry, language translation, and more in a mathematical context that instantly requires readers to confront probabilistic behavior, conditionals, variables, functions, recursion, parsing, concatenation, and countless big ideas from linguistics, computer science, mathematics, and literature.

Download the book

The delightful, playful, and intellectually rich projects explored in this book may be more relevant in the age of AI Mania than when first published 35 years ago. Learn more…

Australian Logo Newsletters

POALL 
In the late 1980s – early 1990s, Australian educator Peter Carter created his own Logo newsletter filled with clever programming project ideas. Here are the issues he was able to find, scan, and share.

OzLogo Newsletter
In the early 1990s, a group of Australian educators published a newsletter for Logo-using educators.

Logo Action Research

New Paradigms in Classroom Research on Logo Learning by Daniel Lynn Watt and Molly Lynn Watt
A research monograph (book) of teacher action research funded by the National Science Foundation.
Watt, D. L., & Watt, M. L. (1993). New Paradigms in Classroom Research on Logo Learning. International Society for Technology in Education. 

Logo Action Research paper by Daniel Lynn Watt and Molly Lynn Watt
Molly Lynn Watt & Daniel Lynn Watt (1993) Teacher Research, Action Research: the Logo Action Research Collaborative, Educational Action Research, 1:1, 35-63, DOI: 10.1080/0965079930010104

Miscellaneous Cool Stuff

Logo Quilt Project
Use Turtle Art or Lynx to create collaborative Logo quilts.

Getting Started with ArtLogo
Links to Brian Silverman’s web-based Logo interpreter.

Logo Overnight by Mitchel Resnick
A collection of Logo programming challenges taking advantage of computing power and time.

Papers by Cynthia Solomon

Teaching Young Children to Program in a Logo Turtle Computer Culture
Report: Logo Learning and Teaching Styles
ACM SIGCUE BULLETIN, July, 1978, pps. 20-29.

A First Lesson
1974 Logo Working Paper 26

Articles by the Watts

Teacher-Made Microworlds: or Training Teachers to Use Logo Logo vs. Training Them to Teach It by Dan Watt
Watt, D. (1985). Teacher-Made Microworlds: or Training Teachers to Use Logo Logo vs. Training Them to Teach It Educational Computing Organization of Ontario.  

The Power of Logo by Dan and Molly Watt (late 1980s)

Twenty Powerful Ideas by Molly Watt
Watt, M. (1985). Twenty Powerful Ideas. National Logo Exchange (September 1985). 

Logo Quilt: A Collaborative Learning Project by Dan and Molly Lynn Watt in the May 1986 issue of Logo Exchange.This is the original seed that has blossomed into many projects, notably Josh Burker’s Turtle Art Tiles Project.

Gary Stager Article(s)

Scroll to Top