Shortly after my professional entry into teaching technology and media didactics, I read for the first time in 1975 in an overview volume „Computer und Unterricht“ (Eyferth et al., 1974) about the Logo project of Papert at MIT. Considered by the authors „as one of the most remarkable attempts of meaningful computer use in class according to its curicular and didactic objectives“, they tried to prove this by means of typical program examples. These showed simple geometric line figures drawn with the „Turtle“, a controllable robot.

These pictures were and are typical for the use of Logo in a school context. They can be found in early publications on Logo (the manuals for different Logo versions and many introductory books). I was immediately attracted by the images and the possibilities for their creation. For me, they have a very unique aesthetic with a high recognition value in the corresponding publications.

This book therefore focuses on typical images created with the turtle graphic. In some examples, the proximity to works of early computer art (which I have included as homages to the artists), but also to well-known optical illusions (which I call „Opticals“) becomes very obvious.

Only basic programming concepts that are used to generate the respective images are briefly outlined. The book is therefore not an introduction to programming with Logo, but rather a picture book, which may inspire you to program these and comparable pictures yourself.

Tübingen, April 2020                                             Joachim Wedekind