Logo is more than a programming language. It is a learning environment where children explore mathematical ideas and create projects of their own design. Logo, the first computer language explicitly designed for children, was invented by Seymour Papert, Wallace Feurzeig, Daniel Bobrow, and Cynthia Solomon in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN).

Logo’s design drew upon two theoretical frameworks: Jean Piaget’s constructivism and Marvin Minsky’s Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

Papert collaborated with Piaget for several years before joining Minsky at the AI Lab. While with Piaget, Papert saw concretely that children are not empty vessels into which you pour knowledge. They are scientists who form theories and test their own knowledge acquisition. Thus Logo supported expansive worlds, or microworlds, in which children could explore and experiment and debug their experiments.

The members of the initial Logo team were part of the artificial intelligence community at BBN and MIT and were accustomed to programming in Lisp. One of the foundational ideas was that children should have the most powerful possible programming language. Logo is characterized by many of the same design choices as early Lisp: symbolic computation, recursive functions, operation on linked lists, and dynamic scoping of variables.

What Logo added to Jean Piaget’s model of children constructing knowledge was the idea that this mental process happens best when children make things like programs or drawings and reflect on their thinking, rather than thinking about some piece of knowledge in the abstract. Papert later coined the term Constructionism to distinguish this idea from Piaget’s Constructivism while still acknowledging how the former builds upon the latter. The virtue of computer programming as a medium for artifacts is that programs are much more versatile than any physical construction medium, and that programs give rise to actions, bringing the program alive.