OSS + ELC EU 2026

In 1967, Seymour Papert, Wally Feurzeig, and Cynthia Solomon built a language based on studies of Piaget whose radical premise still hasn't been fully cashed in: children should program the computer, not be programmed by it. Logo gave them a turtle an "object to think with" and a place to live in mathematics by walking it, drawing it, and making it their own.

Half a century later, most kids meet software as something to consume, not construct. This talk argues that Papert's constructionism and the free-software ethos are the same idea one generation apart, both are about the freedom to understand and reshape your own tools and that open source is exactly how we finally deliver Logo's promise at scale.

I'll show TurtleGrove: a UCBLogo compatible interpreter we created that runs in any browser, with a Rust core and a vanilla-JS frontend, fully open source and self-hostable.

In the OpenSource mindset children can even show-and-share their code with other children. Working on their own canvas or creating art together. Children learn the best, when learning together. We use this also in the Living OpenSource project to introduce kids in African countries into programming.