Turtle Blocks

Over the past couple weeks, my classmates and I have immersed ourselves into the key concepts of computational thinking. Along with this came specific technological programs such as Turtle Blocks.

With my blog post coming post-class, I have the unique ability to reflect not only on my work using Turtle Blocks but my classmates as well. Throughout the class session, I was able to pick up on new techniques/ideas that I had not yet explored and/or knew about. A few that stick out in my mind was Monique’s use of music, Ezra’s incredible image where they created all separate tabs only to tag them altogether into one start button and Brooke’s use of many different turtles. Needless to say those were not the only masterpieces, I was able to learn from each classmate.

Circling back to my story of how I got where I am. My original creation was the classic Olympic symbol. I was able to use the plane coordinates to help place the turtle and then essentially used the same formula 5 times to generate 5 symmetrical circles. After saving the project, I made the mistake of not understanding where to put it and how to properly hold on to it. With that, my original creation was gone and I had to go back to my Turtle Blocks drawing board.

I decided to take on a more difficult challenge the second time and that was writing my name. At first, I struggled as I kept writing a few letters before messing up my coordinate points forcing myself to start over. As a side note, one piece that that I wish Turtle Blocks had was an undo or erase marker. That would have come handy for the few times my turtle decided to draw an errant line across my whole project. (Clearly all the turtles fault as I’m nowhere to blame for it)

So after some trials and tribulation, I finally was able to put together a run of accurate X,Y Coordinates. In the photo below, you can see the final masterpiece.