What mystifies me is back in the 80s there was a relatively successful amount of programming at school using mainly Logo but also BBC Basic (which doesn't suck nearly as much as other basics). The real tragedy is Logo fell out of favour so quickly for no particular reason.
at high school we got taught CECIL and basic and touched upon a the other languages and there feild of usage. Also taught the history part as well. Had a 380z research machine, BBC micro in the final year and also access to a 2903 ICL mainframe running george over a 300buad acoustic coupler and then would take upto an hour to get a good connection. Sometime later computer studies got turned into a secratary skills on a computer and called ICT.
Logo was great and in some way we still have it at toy level with the various programable toys via mobile phones and let us not forget we still have bigtrax. Though Lego are doing things now we could only dream of as children. Computer back then also came with a programming language interface, nowadays that is a optional extra sadly and is akin to a generation knowing how to drive and how a engine worked so they could identify a fault and fix it to those that can just drive.
Yip they were well built. Apparently if you entered the front panel (ctrl+F iirc you got a hex debugger) you could single step thru the machine code, now if your did that for the graphic panel part you could blow the screen -- luckily this did not get learned from expereience.
Well logo didn't really have much potential other than for drawing stuff with a turtle. This wasn't because it wasn't capable of glorious things (which it was) but more that it was hard for the staff to understand compared to BBC BASIC.
