Physical Turtle Graphics

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.

More posts on logo and turtle graphics:

• The History of Turtle Bots – Logo!
• The History of Turtle Bots – Part 1: Hardware
• The Apple II Source Code for the LOGO Language Found #VintageComputing
• Modern Turtle Graphics, the descendants of LOGO in Python #Python #LOGO @ThePSF
• CircuitPython turtle rainbow benzene
• left! right! forward! turtle power! Python Turtle with CircuitPython