And They Were Thinking? Basic, Logo, Personality and Pedagogy

This paper is concerned with some limited aspects of the history of two programming languages purpose-designed for students learning to program digital computers: Basic and Logo. The focus is the very different educational aims and philosophies of the originators of these languages. They are compared and their early use in schools sketched. While the reasons for teaching students to write programs were initially based on experience in programming digital computers for non-educational use, despite extensive research and publications, it would seem that the teacher of today is not in a much better position to justify teaching programming than the original pioneers.