Kids and adults have been learning to program in LOGO for about four decades. My first computer was a VIC 20, and I was stuck with the built in BASIC language, but I did steal as much time as I could in the school library playing with LOGO on an Apple II.

Now that my son is expressing an interest in computer programming, I decided LOGO might be a good place to start. I found FMSLogo on SourceForge, and it seem to be a clean and simple implementation for Windows. It comes with a number of demo programs (download the “Extras”) would-be programmers can dig into and pick apart. I’ll set it up on the boy’s computer this week, and teach him a few basic turtle control commands to get him started. And if anyone knows of other LOGO implementations that are better, let me know.

UPDATE: Here’s a pretty neat LOGO programming introduction, designed for the OLPC project. It should work ok with FMSLogo, as far as I can tell. Once again, suggestions are welcome. And here’s another LOGO primer.