Purpose. The purpose of the following exercise (available in PDF, PS, WordPerfect) is to familiarize the students with the basic drawing capabilities of LOGO. The students should learn the basic drawing commands and begin to see how to construct simple LOGO programs. They will also observe some of the computing capabilities of LOGO.

Audience. All students wishing to certify to teach K-4 at Texas Tech University are required to complete a three course sequence of mathematics content courses (nine hours total) beginning with College Algebra and ending with a junior level course in Elementary Geometry. [This sequence is described in detail in an article titled "The Nine Hour Mathematics Sequence for the General Pre-service Elementary Teacher at Texas Tech University," written by Gary A. Harris and J. Dalton Tarwater, and to appear in PRIMUS] The students complete this exercise near the end of the Geometry course.

Recommendation. The exercise is intended to emphasize student cooperation and discovery. Thus the exercise should be done in the computer lab with students working in pairs, with one person operating the keyboard and the other recording their observations.

Objective. By the end of the exercise the students should have developed their own dictionary of basic LOGO graphics commands. They should have a good understanding of the elementary graphics capabilities of LOGO, and should have reinforced their understanding of some of the basic concepts of plane geometry.

Reference. Online information about LOGO can be found at the Logo Foundation home page. The version of LOGO used for this exercise was developed at Berkeley by Brian Harvey and his students, and can be downloaded free of charge from Brian Harvey's home page.