[gavanwoolery]

I used to joke that Voxel Quest was just a fancy 3d graphing calculator. I think the entryway for a lot of students to become interested in math is to make rendering more accessible. Shadertoy is one step towards this, but SDF equations are much more difficult to grok than binary on/off voxel plotting, and they have to be mathematically sound or you get buggy looking results.

[TeMPOraL]

During my university times, I often used EvalDraw as quick 2D/3D graphing calculator:

http://advsys.net/ken/download.htm

You type in some C-ish code, it gets immediately executed and drawn. Instant feedback was a winner feature here. Graphing y=f(x) was AFAIR as simple as typing "(x)" in the first line and writing an expression in the next. "(x,t)" for time-varying singals, "(x,y)" for 2-d functions with values viewed as colors, "(x,y,z,&r,&g,&b)" for full-voxels, etc.

I don't even remember how this little program found its way to my hard drive, but I had a lot of good times with it.

[Darkskynet]

Thanks so much for sharing this! This is awesome :D

Me and my boyfriend are both math nerds and will both love this :)

[satori99]

My first programming experience was using Logo on an Atari 800 as a 6 or 7 year old, and I instantly grasped the concept of a giving commands to a turtle with a pen.

It was as game-like as most entertainment software of its time, but it subtly forced me to learn some math in order to create complex shapes.

I think of Minecraft as a similarly clever idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)

[clan]

I do not get why Logo went out of fashion. To me it is the king among learners.

The physicality of the Logo turtle robot we had at our school back in the eighties was what made it "click" for me. Playing with something connected to the real world takes it to another level.

[kbouck]

Logo evolved into modern-day Scratch, which is included with the pi (raspbian).

http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/history...

http://www.elica.net/download/papers/LogoTreeProject.pdf

[clan]

Scratch is really great - do not get me wrong! But I find it too advanced. They do support various external hardware. And I can highly recommend the Make lock mbot. Truly awesome.

But Scratch is one step up the ladder to me. It is a commitment to an eco-system and a super nice but blank canvas.

I find Logo to be simpler and more limited. This is a "good thing"(tm) when getting kids hooked. The first hit should always be free :-)

I have gotten some of my non-technical friends to buy mbots. They like the idea but the learning curve was to steep for them.

[sokoloff]

There’s a subset of scratch that felt very logo like. My kids (5 and 7 at the time) readily picked it up.

Their hardest struggle was dragging the blocks around with the touchpad. It would have been less frustrating to have a keyboard-based interface I think. (Now that I type this, I realize maybe I should have tried a two button mouse for them.)

[watersb]

Logo is still available as a major mode of LibreOffice.