Terms Of Service

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Effective date: 11 October 2026 · Last updated: 11 October 2026

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) apply to your use of the turtleSpaces website, the turtleSpaces web IDE, the desktop apps and related services (together, “turtleSpaces”). turtleSpaces is provided by April Ayres-Griffiths and Melody Ayres-Griffiths (published as RetroCoders), British Columbia, Canada (“we”, “us”). You can reach us at help@turtlespaces.org.

Please read these Terms together with our Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle personal data.

Contents

  1. Accepting these Terms
  2. Who can use turtleSpaces
  3. Accounts
  4. Acceptable use
  5. Your content
  6. AI features
  7. Our intellectual property
  8. Availability and changes to the service
  9. Liability
  10. Ending your use
  11. Changes to these Terms
  12. Governing law and disputes
  13. Contact

Accepting these Terms

By using turtleSpaces you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use turtleSpaces. If you use turtleSpaces for a school or other organisation, you confirm you are allowed to accept these Terms for it.

turtleSpaces is currently free to use. If we ever offer paid features, we will add terms for them here before they are offered, and nothing you already have access to for free will start costing money without notice.

Who can use turtleSpaces

Anyone can use the turtleSpaces IDE without an account.

To create an account:

  • you must be old enough to consent to data processing yourself in your country (between 13 and 16 in the EU, 13 in the UK and US), or
  • a parent or guardian must agree to these Terms and the Privacy Policy for you, or
  • your school must have set up your use of turtleSpaces (for example through a class group).

If you are a parent or guardian allowing a child to use turtleSpaces, you are responsible for the child’s use of it. See Children in the Privacy Policy.

Accounts

  • Keep your password secret and do not share your account. Tell us if you think someone else has used it.
  • Choose a username that is not your real name and is not rude or offensive. We may change or remove usernames that break these Terms.
  • Give a correct email address, so that you can recover your account and receive important notices.
  • If you are in a class group, the group owner (for example your teacher) can see your username, email address and progress, and can reset your password.

Acceptable use

You must not use turtleSpaces to:

  • break the law or encourage others to break it;
  • post content that is hateful, harassing, sexual, violent, or otherwise unsuitable for a service used by children;
  • share other people’s personal information, or your own real name, address, school or contact details in public projects;
  • bully, threaten or impersonate anyone;
  • upload content you do not have the right to share, or that infringes someone else’s copyright or other rights;
  • send spam, malware, or content designed to mislead;
  • try to get into accounts, data or systems you are not allowed to access, or test, scan or attack our systems;
  • overload the service, for example with automated requests, or use the AI features in bulk or to build a competing product;
  • get around limits or safety measures we put in place.

We may remove content and suspend or close accounts that break these rules. Where reasonable, we will tell you why.

Your content

You own the programs and projects you create. We do not claim ownership of them.

  • Private projects. You give us permission to store, copy and process your projects only as needed to provide turtleSpaces to you.
  • Published projects are public. When you publish a project, anyone can see it, run it, and remix it, and it is shown with your username. You give us, and other users, a worldwide, free, non-exclusive licence to host, display, run, copy, adapt and share that published project, and remixes of it, within turtleSpaces. Published projects are not offered under any other licence: apart from this, you keep all rights in your work.
  • Remixes. If you remix someone else’s published project, the original author is credited, and you may use it only as allowed above.
  • You can hide a published project at any time. Copies that other users already remixed may stay available.
  • You are responsible for making sure you have the right to share what you publish.

Please report content that you think breaks these Terms or someone’s rights to help@turtlespaces.org. We will review notices under the EU Digital Services Act and act on illegal content.

AI features

turtleSpaces includes features powered by artificial intelligence, such as the Shelly assistant, “explain” and “comment” for procedures, tutorial generation, exercise checking, and class progress summaries.

  • AI output can be wrong, incomplete or unsuitable. Check it before relying on it. It is not professional, educational or other advice, and it is not a formal assessment of a student.
  • Do not put personal information into AI requests. What you send is shared with our AI providers, as described in AI features in the Privacy Policy.
  • You may use code the assistant gives you in your own projects.
  • We may limit how much you can use the AI features, and we may change or remove them.

Our intellectual property

turtleSpaces, including its software, design, logos, documentation and example projects, belongs to us or our licensors and is protected by law. You may use it as these Terms allow. Unless we say otherwise, you may not copy, sell or reverse-engineer the service, except where the law allows it.

Example projects and tutorials we publish may be used for learning and teaching, including in class. All other rights in our documentation, tutorials and examples are reserved.

Availability and changes to the service

We work to keep turtleSpaces available and working, but we cannot promise it will always be available, free of errors, or that saved data can never be lost. Keep your own copies of important work (for example by exporting it).

We may change, add or remove features. If we plan to close turtleSpaces or remove your ability to get your projects, we will give reasonable notice where we can, so that you can export your work.

Liability

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes any liability that cannot be limited or excluded by law. This includes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, for gross negligence or intent where the law does not allow it to be limited, and your mandatory rights as a consumer.

Subject to that:

  • turtleSpaces is provided free of charge, and we provide it “as is” to the extent the law allows;
  • we are not liable for losses that were not reasonably foreseeable, or for losses caused by events outside our reasonable control;
  • if you use turtleSpaces for a business, we are not liable for loss of profit, business or revenue, and our total liability to you is limited to CAD $100.

If you are a consumer in the EU or the UK, you keep all the rights the law of your country gives you, and nothing in these Terms affects them.

Ending your use

You can stop using turtleSpaces at any time. To close your account, email help@turtlespaces.org from the email address on your account, and we will delete it within 30 days.

We may suspend or close your account if you seriously or repeatedly break these Terms, if the law requires it, or to protect other users. Except in urgent cases, we will tell you first and explain why, and you can ask us to review the decision.

When an account is closed, we delete or anonymise your personal data as described in the Privacy Policy. Projects you published and other users remixed may stay available as remixes.

Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms when turtleSpaces or the law changes. We will change the “last updated” date above. For important changes we will tell account holders in advance by email or in the IDE. If you do not agree to the new Terms, you can stop using turtleSpaces and close your account.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of British Columbia and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of British Columbia have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer living in the EU or the UK, you also benefit from the mandatory consumer protection rules of the country where you live, and you may bring a claim in the courts of that country.

If you have a complaint, please contact us first — we will try to sort it out. We are not obliged to take part in, and do not take part in, an alternative dispute resolution scheme.

Contact

For any question about these Terms, email help@turtlespaces.org. If you need to write to us by post, ask by email and we will give you an address.