Psychological Studies IDENTIFIERS *LOGO Programing Language

The thinking processes of students of Logo were examined to identify programming problems and possible instructional remedies. Subjects were 11 students between the ages of 8 and 12 who had completed 5 weeks of Logo instruction. These students were given a series of five short programming problems highlighting such areas of difficulty as judging angles, deciding on the directions of turns, using a variable, and using a subprocedure. The data collected included notes taken by the experimenter recording program errors, attempted repairs, and code written by students. A coding system was used to provide a measure of students ' successes and errors in terms of tas number of elements in a program they programmed correctly and their problem-solving efforts. The success rate in terms of elements correct was high, but success in terms of programs running successfully was lower, and a number of problems with what might b