Brian Silverman and I developed the LogoWeb to enable students to share dynamic artifacts with one another.
To the student, the LogoWeb software looks identical to MicroWorlds, the most common commercial version
of Logo. Students can use the LogoWeb software to create animated stories and simulations, just as they would
in MicroWorlds. But instead of saving their projects on a local hard disk, students can save their projects on the
LogoWeb (a network totally separate from the World Wide Web). Once a project is saved on the LogoWeb,
anyone else with an Internet connection and a copy of the LogoWeb software can access the students' creations.
The LogoWeb hides all of the messy inner workings of the Internet (such as URLs and directory hierarchies)
from the students. Students need to learn only two new commands: savelink (to save a project on the
LogoWeb) and linkto (to access a project on the LogoWeb). Students use multiple-word file names to create
an implicit directory structure (for example, using the name of their school as the first word in the file name).
In an initial trial, two elementary-school classrooms (one in California and one in New York) used the
LogoWeb to post copies of video games that they had written in Logo. Students at each site were able to try out
one another's games, look at the underlying code, and copy segments that they found useful for their own
projects. In the future, the LogoWeb could serve as an ever-growing museum of Logo projects, where students
go to get ideas for new projects and to exchange projects with friends.
Of course, it would be much better if these types of projects could be shared on the World Wide Web itself,
rather than on the separate LogoWeb network with its own software. With the new Java programming language,
people can now create LogoWeb-like dynamic projects on the World Wide Web. But there is a problem: Java is
designed for expert programmers, not for pre-college students. Java will no doubt lead to a proliferation of
dynamic Web pages, but most students will be only users of those pages, not designers.
In an effort to blur this boundary between designers and users, our research group is now developing a new
environment that we call Cocoa-a type of "Java for kids." As with LogoWeb, students can create Logo-like
animations and simulations, but they can place them directly on the World Wide Web. A major challenge is to
facilitate the sharing of objects in Cocoa. Our goal is to make it easy for students to copy and reuse parts of each
other's projects-for example, copying a "flying bird" from one project and inserting it into a different project.
We are developing libraries of "clip behaviors," analogous to clip art. Students can clip a behavior from one
page and insert it directly into another object.