We’ve written extensive blog posts on turtle graphics over the last year. To define what we mean by logo and turtle graphics:
Logo is an educational programming language known for its use of turtle graphics. Commands for movement produce drawings on a screen that teach students to understand, predict and think about the turtle’s motion by imagining what they would do if they were the turtle.
We were interested in Brinn Labs when they posted about physical turtle graphics – making your own algorithm out of pieces and having a machine based on a microcontroller run them. Here are the pieces below the children can select:
And the result after running their program
A wonderful way to give some tangible feel to choices and outcomes.
Adafruit hopes to bring turtle graphics to microcontrollers in a smaller form factor but similar to this work.
Below are some videos of this work. See the end of this article for additional Adafruit posts on turtle graphics.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
