5th graders have spent the last two months programming in a LOGO environment. LOGO is an oldie but a goodie. I used it myself as a 5th grader. It is a great piece of software for the students to use in the spring because it aligns perfectly with the math unit on geometry. Students programmed a turtle to move around the screen, drawing pictures, and they used their math knowledge to calculate the interior angles of polygons to draw shapes. Every class they built on their previous knowledge to learn LOGO commands, write their own commands, introduce variables into their commands, and combine commands to create more complicated commands. For example, each student taught their turtle how to draw a square by writing their own square command and how to draw a triangle by writing their own triangle command using the following commands that the turtle already knew: repeat, forward, and right. They then combined their square and triangle commands to teach the turtle how to draw a house. The final culminating project was getting the turtle to draw a scene related to their science "Project O" field trip.
