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Forward 100 Logo and Your Child, A New Way of Learning was written as a follow-up to his best-selling, multi-language, multi-edition book Computers and Your Child.
Viking/Penguin published Forward 100 in both the USA and the UK in 1984/5. The title words "Forward 100" refer to a common instruction in the LOGO computer language, which was popularised for educational use by Professor Seymour Papert of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In the 1980’s, there was a strong feeling that children should be taught how to understand computers (rather than the other way around), and Forward 100 provides an historical insight into how this movement developed in the USA and the UK.
Excerpt from Forward 100 (1984):
"It is the astonishing spread of personal computing power that is causing the greatest separation of the West from the Soviet bloc. The imbalance of nuclear arms is the usual factor considered in the context of the balance of power, but either the Soviet Union has not seen the computer revolution coming or, more likely, the rulers have realized that the spread of personal computing power will make their territory ungovernable in the traditional sense.
"Whatever the reason, while the majority of Westerners buy computers and go on-line, creating an electronic matrix around the world, the majority of Soviet citizens have never seen a computer.
"Writing in Izvestiya, Anatoily P. Aleksandrov, the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, has claimed that Russia is failing to make use of even the small amount of computer equipment it manufactures. The main problem, Aleksandrov states, is a lack of awareness of the potential of computers among the population at large. He compares the problem of overcoming this deficiency as a task comparable with 'eliminating illiteracy' after the Bolshevik revolution. In the West, a major thrust of the computer revolution has taken place in tiny free-enterprise ventures, and this massive head start is likely to have very profound effects on the future balance between the world's main ideologies."
Order Forward 100 from Amazon.co.uk.
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