Previous Logo Summer Institutes
A time to focus on your own learning during a week or two of Logo exploration and creation.

The 2005 Logo Summer Institutes are built on 25 years of experience and tradition. In 1980 Logo Foundation president Michael Tempel conducted a Logo Institute under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences. It began the Computers in Schools Project, which introduced Logo into the New York City Public Schools and Bank Street College. He continued this work for 10 years at Logo Computer Systems, Inc. and since 1991 with the Logo Foundation, organizing and teaching Logo workshops in scores of schools and districts around the USA and abroad. These include the St. Paul Logo Project in Minnesota, the Computers in Education Program in Costa Rica, Project Lighthouse in Thailand, and the Iowa Early Childhood Papert Parternship.

These Summer Institutes attract a diverse group. Most participants are teachers and most are from the United States, but there have been people from Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America; home schoolers, parents, engineers, college professors, and programmers.

The workshops provide an immersion in Logo learning and project building. Participants use MicroWorlds™ and other Logo software environments to design and build multimedia projects, games, and simulations; to explore mathematics, language, and music.

You can look at and download some of the projects that participants developed during the 1998 Logo Summer Institute.

Read what Gary McCallister had to say about the 1995 Logo Summer Institute in St. Paul, Minnesota.

We began to include robotics in the Summer Institutes in the mid 1980s with the introduction of LEGO TC Logo™. In recent Institutes participants design and build cybernetic devices of all kinds and control them using a variety of robotics systems from LEGO® Dacta, Terrapin Software, and the MIT Media Lab. We now use both the RCX programmable brick from LEGO and the Handy Cricket.

The Summer Institutes are not all workshopping. There are late afternoon and evening sightseeing tours and recreational activities. The particular events change from year to year. Here are some of the things we've done recently.

At Ridgeway State Park near Montrose, Colorado

In Colorado

• Visiting the Dinosaur Museum in Grand Junction. The area has yielded large numbers of fossils and there are active digs nearby.
• Rafting on the Colorado River.
• Hiking through the Colorado National Monument
• Tours of local wineries.
• A visit to the top of the Grand Mesa, a plateau more than 3000 meters (almost 11,000 feet) high covered with meadows, forests and lakes. The climate is very different from the desert down below.
• A trip to Ouray, where we toured an old silver mine, hiked in Box Canyon, and soaked in the hot spring.

Dinner in Little Italy following a ferry ride and walking tour of downtown New York.

In New York City

• Museum visits. Last summer we visited the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian museum of design.
• A tour of New York Harbor on the Staten Island Ferry, followed by a walking tour of some of the historic neighborhoods of Old New York. We ended up in Little Italy for dinner.
• The "You've Got Mail" tour conducted by Hope Chafiian and Michael Tempel who both live in the neighborhood where the film was made.