I cracked a book and found out that Python supports turtle graphics. I love drawing pictures with graphics. I have since I was in university. So today I played around with the Python turtle a bit.
Mostly I played with a few of the usual turtle methods and wrapping drawing code inside loops. I had some fun but didn’t learn a lot. I’m not sure that was the most productive use of my time.
It did suggest that using graphics with Python is potentially a way to make learning Python more interesting. I have Mark Guzdial’s book on Media Computation around here somewhere. I’m going to dig it out and see if it the libraries for it will work in my environment. I want to do more than draw lines.
3 comments:
We use Turtle for several introductory exercises in the National Computer Science School Challenge (https://ncss.edu.au/ncss-challenge) attended by thousands of school children in Australia and beyond. In conjunction with Blockly, it provides beginner students with a very visual introduction to the flow of a computer program.
I teach Python to kids as young as 9 years old with graphics, and I actually don't use Turtle until we get to loops.
I really enjoy working with Processing to do graphics (with Python) and have also played around with Pygame. I recommend using Mu IDE for Pygame because it is seamless to use Pygame and Pygame Zero.
+1 for Processing. I use it in both my Python and Java courses just as soon as we hit nested loops, and students love it, whether it's a Game of Life, photo processing, or building an interactive game.
I used to use PyGame, but installation challenges got in the way. After switching over to Processing, we haven't looked back.
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