OK, so let me introduce my project. After some time spent on thinking an googling, I decided to call it Logeox. I know, I know, it is a bad name, and you don’t write multimillion dollar apps with such lousy names. Whatever. Naming things is hard.
Anyway, since I have a six-year-old daughter, and I really really want her to learn a bit programming (I’m not going to press too hard, of course, and I’m fine if she doesn’t become a professional – or even a hobby – programmer, but I think that well-educated people in today’s world should have a rough idea of how computers work, and this means some kind of coding), I’d like to make something for kids to learn basic (really basic) coding.
And what could be better for that than a bit of turtle graphics? I mean, I was born in the seventies, I learned about Logo when I was nine or so – even before I got my first computer – and I tell you, nothing is cooler than a computer making my drawings for me! Especially if you’re a kid with no drawing talent. (Fun fact: a six-year-old daughter telling the Daddy that he must draw her a dinosaur is a good way to discover a drawing talent.)
So I decided to make a small Logo-like system for Android (rather tablets than phones, for obvious reasons). My main goals are:
In case you’re still wondering about that stupid name, it comes from “LOcal GEOmetry eXplorer”. I kind of liked that it both sounds (a bit) like Logo, and at the same time conveys that Logo is a very nice tool to explain basic topological concepts pertaining to locality. (Yes, this is inspired by Abelson’s and diSessa’s seminal book, which I devoured as a teenager. Only much later did I learn who Abelson is…)