DO YOU REMEMBER THE TURTLE?

I was lucky enough to be chosen to participate in the “Gifted” program at Fowler Drive Elementary (Athens, GA) when I was in the 1^st grade. The mid-80s are a blur now, but I remember one exciting morning vividly.

As was customary, a small group of students and myself were pulled from each of the 1^st grade classrooms located in the Earth Shelter a couple hours into the school day. We were assembled in the hallway, and instructed by our teacher (whose name I cannot remember) to take our places in front of one of four or five computers. They were Apple IIs:

We were challenged to make the “Turtle” (a triangle-shaped cursor) move around the screen. We learned to make the "Turtle" advance by typing the word “FORWARD” followed by a number. For example:

FORWARD 50

This caused the “Turtle” to “walk” forward 50 steps (centimeters I think). I found it fascinating that he left a trail behind courtesy of the pen tied to his tail!

The commands, FORWARD and BACK, changed the “Turtle's” place on the screen, while LEFT and RIGHT changed the direction in which he faced in degrees. For example:

LEFT 90

Tells the “Turtle” to rotate 90 degrees to his left.

Throughout that morning, we learned to combine commands and program the “Turtle” to create shapes like squares, circles, and even flowers…

…similar to these images (courtesy of AnimaliaLife and SydLexia)

The “Turtle” was the graphical representation of a programming language called LOGO. Invented at MIT in 1967, LOGO was the brainchild of South African mathematician Seymour Papert, and computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Cynthia Solomon. The duo imagined a computer in every classroom, for every child at a time when almost no one entertained such ideas for logistical and financial reasons. Papert and Solomon persisted, and LOGO developed into a valuable tool for teaching programming to children and promoting computational thinking in early childhood education curriculum.

I strongly encourage you to explore the following related links:

20 things to do with a Computer

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/5836/AIM-248.pdf?sequence=2

Seymor Papert

http://www.papert.org/

Cynthia Solomon’s LOGO

http://logothings.wikispaces.com/

A “Wired” article about LOGO

https://www.wired.com/2007/10/forward-40-wher/

LOGO history, via MIT

http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/history.html

Syd Lexia’s LOGO

http://www.sydlexia.com/logo.htm

Math Education Sites

http://www.mathsnet.net/home.html?name=Home

LOGO in action:

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WHO INVENTED THE INTERNET? A BROTHER NAMED PHIL.

"The Internet as we know it today did not cross my mind. I was hypothesizing a planetary-sized supercomputer and, broadly speaking, my focus was on how the present creates the future and how our image of the future inspires the present." –Dr. Philip Emeagwali

Precocious. Intelligent. Gifted. Genius. Those are some of my favorite words. And when it comes to technology, and the people behind great advancements in technology, you often here those words used in descriptions of said people. Philip Emeagwali was a precocious child. He is an intelligent, gifted, genius.

Born in 1954 in Akure, Nigeria, Emeagwali came of age during the Nigerian CivilWar. He spent two years in a refugee camp along with his family until, at the age of 14, he joined in the fight for Biafran independence. Even as a child soldier, Emeagwali’s aptitude for numbers was recognizable. At the age of 15, he earned the nickname “Calculus” after publishing a book on “infinitesimal calculus” and constructing a “calculo analog computer”.

Despite war’s devastation, and despite having to drop out of school due to his father’s inability to pay for his education, young Philip continued to study on his own. He eventually completed a general education certificate from the University of London, was awarded a 4-year scholarship to Oregon State University, then earned two master’s degrees, and a doctorate in scientific computing from the University of Michigan. 

He conceived and invented the internet while at Michigan.

As a native of oil-rich Nigeria, Emeagwali understood how oil was drilled. That knowledge and experience was invaluable in the debates on the Ann Arbor campus regarding how to use computers to simulate the detection of oil reservoirs.The methodology was the subject of his dissertation. Based on an idea about predicting the weather he remembered from a science fiction story, and inspired by the construction of honeycombs, Emeagwali concluded it would be better to use the many thousands of microprocessors of smaller computers to perform computations instead of expensive supercomputers. He sought and gained permission to use the “Connection Machine” at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This machine was designed to run over 65,000 interconnected microprocessors, and was sitting unused because no one had figured out how to program it properly. That is, until a brother named Phil showed up.

In 1989, Emeagwali connected remotely to the Connection Machine and programmed it to use approximately 65,000 globally dispersed microprocessors to accurately calculate the amount of oil in a simulated reservoir. Emeagwali’s Hyperball International Network was the original World Wide Web.

No man (or woman) is an island, therefore I sincerely recognize the great works of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Khan, and Vinton Cerf.

BUT WHEN IT COMES TO 28 YEAR-OLD INTERNET, PHILIP EMEAGWALI….

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