January 2012 Volume 15 Number 1 - Educational Technology ...

Table 1. The MSWLogo commands learned by the participants
Figure 1. The MSWLogo programming interface
All the participating children had learned Word, PowerPoint and PhotoImpact in their third- and fourth-grade
computer classes before attending this programming camp. In contrast, not all parents had had computer experience.
Table 2 shows the three parents’ profiles. As far as the children’s prior geometry knowledge is concerned, they were
familiar with basic geometric shapes and could identify key characteristics of those basic shapes, but none of them
knew the concept of external angles. MSWLogo was new to all participants, parents and children alike.
The Procedure
The MSWLogo camp was held for 5 days, 3 one-hour periods per day. The instructor was an experienced teacher
who had taught elementary computer courses for more than 10 years. In each period the instructor introduced one or
more MSWLogo commands and showed a few examples first, he then assigned tasks for the parent-child pairs to
work on for the remainder of the period. There were a total of 33 programming tasks assigned during the entire
camp. Table 3 shows some of the tasks solved successfully by a parent-child pair.
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