This is my last semester at the School of Information at umich. I’m only taking a few courses, and no longer working on a thesis, so I have some extra time for my passions.
One of those passions is educational software. Does anyone remember LOGO? Turtle graphics? For a brief period in the late 70s and early 80s, thousands of schools throughout the country introduced children to a computer language called LOGO. Kids could program a little computer turtle (usually represented as a triangle) to move around on screen. The creators of Logo (primarily Seymour Papert) saw it as a revolutionary new educational philosophy. The idea was to get children actively involved in the learning process. Students learn by actually creating and interacting with their world.
LOGO has since died off, but it impacted a lot of people, including myself. For an entrepreneurship course this past semester, we wrote business plans. My business plan was for a software company that designs revolutionary educational mobile software. Software like LOGO and Robot Odyssey.
So, over the past week, I’ve been working on a LOGO implementation for cell phones. I have an initial version running now, which you can see below in an emulator:
It looks simple, but underneath that simplicity is a full programming language. To assist users who are on cell phones without keyboards, I used a menu system like the one used in the wonderful Calc project:
I’ve got versions working for MIDP 2.0 devices and current generation (Pearl on up) BlackBerry devices. You can download them from the URLs below:
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