A conversation about how the LogoTurtle and ink work led to this project starter.
Love the table paper after class. #LogoTurtle pic.twitter.com/IoBMMayFN0— Erin Riley (@eeriley99) March 9, 2016
@eeriley99 This is great! Are the dots on the vertices from making the turtle wait at that point in the program?— Erik Nauman (@openblackboard) April 14, 2016
.@openblackboard @eeriley99 Yes. Whenever the LogoTurtle pauses or turns the markers tend to "bleed" a bit. It would be interesting to riff.— Josh Burker (@joshburker) April 14, 2016
What better place to play with ink blots than drawing constellations? Since I am an Aries, I found a nice image of the constellation that also modeled the relative brightness of each star.
I used a protractor and a ruler to measure the degrees that the LogoTurtle would need to turn to drive to the next point in the constellation. Conveniently one distance between stars in this image is five centimeters. In order to translate the real distances into LogoTurtle steps, I used the five centimeter measurement as my basis, equating it to 100 LogoTurtle steps. I remarked to the students around me at the time that I was using algebra to figure out the information I needed for my program, so pay attention, kids!
I programmed the procedure to put down the pen and then wait. When the LogoTurtle gets ready to move to the next position, it picks up the pen. I had to play around with the wait time, and it still needs debugging. The goal is to get a good pen bleed where the stars are, which would also provide an element of randomness to each piece produced.
I added this project to the LogoTurtle Curriculum site.
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