ludus! ()
LOGO - draw from memos
Papert's early classroom teaching with computers involved a glass-domed robot called a Turtle, which took instructions in a programming language called LOGO. LOGO learners start off with very straightforward commands that can be understood in material, embodied terms: FORWARD, BACK, LEFT, RIGHT as well as the state of the turtle's pen: PENUP and PENDOWN.
This concrete language encouraged children to work through the problems of programming with their bodies. For children who struggled with math, sending mathematical instructions to an object that responded in material ways often made the "Mathematical Way of Thinking" more graspable. The turtle could operate as an educational transitional object: an object a child projects itself onto in order to process their experience and understanding of the world.
In significant ways, Ludus is an adaptation of LOGO, although it differs from its source material considerably. Ludus is a free translation of LOGO for the 2020s, integrating contemporary approaches to programming language design, the intellectual history of programming at MIT in the 1970s and 80s, and the pedagogical goals and attitudes of LOGO. In particular, Ludus is designed to make important and interesting examples from the history of computing available to students and practitioners who aren't deeply versed in computer programming.
It is also, emphatically, a research project: one of the ways we conduct our research is historical recreation of things in code, often with divergences, often large ones. This is of a piece with Papert's procedural and genetic epistemology; for Papert, all knowing is a kind of knowing-how. Ludus is our historical recreation of LOGO.