Turtle Power!

Do you remember the programming language LOGO? I sure as heck don't that was way before my time. LOGO was designed to be used as a teaching language. It's most enduring feature was not the language though. LOGO has built in, a little graphics section of the language called turtle. The drawing commands were very easy things such as "move forward 5 units", "turn left 30 degrees", "pen up" and so forth. Python has a built in library that allows you to do turtle graphics and its quite fun to play with ( python's turtle package reference). So give it a shot. But I didn't write this post to say just that.

Thinking back to my first CS class it was pretty boring. We did very simple math for our first project. We calculated the area of some rectangles of all things. Which seemed a little trivial. A better waste of our time (At least I think) would have been drawing some simple geometric shapes with turtle graphics. The visual feedback of the little turtles moving along would be much more satisfying then just printing out some simple number to the console.

Not only that the turtle graphics could be used through out the entire class. So you begin with drawing simple polygons taking in the size to draw as a parameter. Next as the class moves into control structures they draw the Fibbonacci Spiral. Then while working on lists or arrays begin drawing fractals such as the Dragon Curve and the Levy C Curve both of which are easily made using list operations. Toward the end of the class they could even touch recursion by drawing the Sierpinski Triangle and the Koch Snowflake which both have natural recursive definitions.

The use of directed, hands on exprimentation is as applicable to computer science as it is to physics or chemistry. Programming is usually such a cranial abstract thing that many have trouble with their first class. The concrete, visual feedback of computer processing, would be a boon to true beginners in picking up on how their programming affects the state of the computer. And watching that little turtle draw lines on screen under your command will be much more satisfying to the beginner then std.out.println(length * width).