A LANGUAGE FOR LEARNING
About LOGO
More than turtle graphics: a small language built around powerful ideas.
LOGO began in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) as one of the first programming languages designed expressly for children and learning.
The people behind LOGO
Its creation was a team effort led by Wally Feurzeig in close collaboration with mathematician and educator Seymour Papert and computer scientist and educator Cynthia Solomon. Daniel Bobrow and other BBN researchers made important early design and implementation contributions.
From words to turtles
Influenced by Lisp, LOGO was designed to be interactive, extensible, and friendly to experimentation. Its earliest activities explored words, sentences, and mathematics. Physical floor turtles—and later turtles drawn on computer screens—made abstract instructions visible: move, turn, observe, revise.
Growing into a movement
During the 1970s, research groups at MIT and elsewhere brought LOGO into classrooms. Personal-computer versions spread widely in the late 1970s and 1980s. Papert’s 1980 book Mindstorms helped popularize constructionist learning through making, testing, and debugging.
“Low threshold and no ceiling” captures LOGO’s enduring promise: approachable for a first program, yet deep enough for recursion, language play, simulations, robotics, art, and mathematics.
Cosmic Turtle is an independent browser implementation inspired by the LOGO tradition. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by BBN, MIT, the Logo Foundation, or any commercial LOGO implementation.