ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN LIMA NEWSLETTER OCTOBER 1990. ^^^^^^^^^ THE ULTIMATE "TI LOGO" TUTORIAL: AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL USER GROUP FUND RAISING PROJECT ^^^^^^^^^^^^^reviewed by Charles Good ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Lima Ohio User Group Here is an opportunity to help yourself and the TI community in the following ways: 1) Explore some TI software about which you are probably unfamiliar; 2) Encourage new users of the 99/4A and thus broaden the user base of our hobby; and 3) Give a charitable donation that is directly related to the use of the 99/4A. You can't lose! Let me introduce you to the Oakland Computer Club of Oakland Maine, perhaps the most active TI user group in the United States. The 50 members are all aged 5-14 and students at Oakland's Atwood-Tapley Elementary School. The members and their six volunteer advisors meet one afternoon or evening a week throughout the entire year. How many other user groups can claim year round weekly scheduled activities? The school library has three permanent 99/4A work stations with printers. There are also 14 mobile computer carts with 99/4A systems, mostly cassette, that are wheeled from classrooms to the library for Computer Club meetings. Student members learn BASIC and LOGO programming, and study using educational software. The Oakland Computer Club even publishes a newsletter once or twice a year, which they send to other user gruups on an exchange basis. Unlike many other TI user group newsletters, the Oakland CC newsletter contains entirely original material including teaching materials and samples of the member's creative efforts. The driving force behind this unique organization is Eunice Spooner, a former elementary school teacher until she was disabled in an auto accident. The other adult volunteers are parents who help set up equipment and provide the Oakland CC with other sorts of non technical assistance. Eunice pretty much organizes the whole thing and is the club's volunteer teacher. She has Masters degrees in Biology and in Education. One of her graduate school projects involved the then newly developed LOGO programming language, and she is probably one of the most knowledgeable people anywhere in TI LOGO II. To acquaint the TI community with the use and operation of TI LOGO and to raise some money for the Oakland CC, Eunice has put together an absolutely supurb LOGO tutorial on videotape with a supplementary disk of software. LOGO is mainly used to create really neat screen graphics. A little triangle shaped object called the "Turtle" is the pen. Logo commands such as Left Turn (so many degrees), Right Turn (so many degrees), Foreword or Backward (so many "turtle steps") move the turtle around the screen. As the turtle moves foreword it draws a line with the aid of "Pen Up" and "Pen Down" commands. You can create really intricate designs by using multiple repetitions of simple designs. In addition to "turtle graphics", TI LOGO II supports text, sprites, and music. As in FORTH, you can develop complex one word LOGO commands which incorporate many simpler words in a specific combination. In LOGO the commands are not called words, they are called "procedures". As an educational tool, LOGO can be used to teach the concept of coordinate systems, the mathematics of geometrical shapes, and computer programming. My 12 year old son used a mechanical LOGO turtle at his school. His turtle rolled across the floor on top of a sheet of paper. With the proper commands, Ian tried to get this mechanical turtle to draw specific shapes on the paper. Eunice's video tape shows the computer screen while you hear Eunice's voice explaining everything that happens. Her teaching talent really shows. I have seen a number of narrated TI99/4A instructional and demonstration videotapes, and in most of them you can't tell from the narration which keypresses produce the screen activity you are seeing on the videotape. Eunice is very careful to avoid this problem. She always says something like, "When I press Function and 1 simultaneously..." and you then see what happens. The video tape is almost 5 hours long, divided into specific lessons each lasting no more than an hour. Your attention span is not taxed because each lesson has a logical break such as saving what you have done so far to disk. One of the problems with my own Funnelweb videotape tutorial is that I talked on and on continuously for almost 2 hours. It was a good tutorial, but it bored many of my viewers after awhile. The LOGO tutorial starts out with the assumption that the viewer knows nothing at all about TI LOGO, which is true for most of us. This doesn't mean that Eunice talks "to children" on the videotape. This tutorial is for a mature audience. Eunice does sometimes say, "When I try to explain this concept to the children I say...." If you already know some LOGO, you can rapidly move on to some of the advanced lessons. Virtually all features of TI LOGO except music programming are covered in a very logical step by step order. The accompanying disk contains all the procedures and tiles created in the videotape, plus some extra stunning graphic displays. At the end of the videotape you can see Eunice herself showing off some of the equipment used by the club, including bulletin board displays and the mobile computer work stations. LOGO is fun for kids of all ages, and it is really educational for school children. If you have kids (or consider yourself a kid) you should introduce them to TI LOGO II. This means you yourself should know something about LOGO, and the best way to learn is from Eunice's tutorial. The VHS video tape and accompanying disk cost $10, including media, postage, and a small amount left over for the coffers of the Oakland CC. Additional donations of money, software, and computer equipment are welcomed by the club. The LOGO tutorial and the Oakland Computer Club are definitely worthy of your attention. Oakland Computer Club c/o Eunice Spooner Box 3720 Webb Road Waterville ME 04901 .PL 1