It has been a busy year for turtleSpaces. Here are the highlights. You can try all of them in the turtleSpaces IDE, which runs in your browser with nothing to install.

A new IDE in your browser

The web IDE has been rebuilt from the ground up. When you open it, you land straight in a running example project to play with. You only need to sign in when you want to save or publish your work.

turtleSpaces MCP (Model Context Protocol) Integration

Overview

turtleSpaces supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling AI assistants like Claude and Gemini to interact directly with the Logo programming environment. This integration allows AI models to read, write, and execute Logo code, capture graphics output, and manage projects.

Command Line Options

To enable MCP mode in turtleSpaces, use the following command line options:

• -mcp – Enable MCP server mode
• -mcp-port <port> – Set the MCP server port (default: 1967)

You can also start the MCP from the File menu…

Hello turtleLand!

We’ve added a ‘Live Coding’ option under the Settings menu that when enabled will allow updates to the code space without terminating the running process, meaning you can make changes to the code and see how they affect the already running worker.

We’ve made buttons, stickers and overlays work in the web IDE (and hence again in the application, which is now a wrapped version of the Web IDE with a native ‘backend’ (the engine that does all the complex stuff).

Spaces contain subsets of the broader turtleSpaces primitive (keyword) set dedicated to various types of creation. They also have restricted feature sets, to enable gradual exposure to everything turtleSpaces has to offer.

You can select a Space from the menu provided by clicking on the name of the current Space (eg omniSpace) in the top-left corner of the web IDE, or by clicking on the link in the following list:

Miss Johnson had been a teacher for more than 20 years. She had taught a variety of subjects to students of different ages and backgrounds, but her favorite subject to teach was computer science. She loved teaching her students about algorithms, programming languages, and how to write code. However, she had always felt that something was missing in her curriculum. She wanted to teach her students more than just how to write code, she wanted to teach them critical thinking skills.

In a recent update to turtleSpaces, we added the ability to create arbitrary shapes, using the beginfill and endfill primitives.

To create a shape, you simply declare beginfill , draw out its borders and then declare endfill. If the lines do not cross each other, then the shape should be created.

For example:

beginfill forward 50 right 90 forward 50 endfill

will create a triangle. But we already have plenty of ways to create triangles, right?

Logo isn’t just all about the turtles! When Logo was first being developed, there were no graphical displays — output was simple text on teletypes, which printed out interactions with the computer on paper. When the developers of Logo went into classrooms to test out their invention on students, all they had were teletypes.

As a result, the first Logo ‘microworld’ was the language microworld, not the geometry microworld which is more often associated with Logo. Logo was designed with many powerful commands used to manipulate strings and lists. Logo is based on Lisp, which stands for List Processing, a programming language in which data and code are the same, and are interchangeable and manipulatable by the running program. In Lisp, as in Logo, programs can modify, create and run themselves.

Terrain can be saved as STL files (under the File menu in the web IDE) and then 3D printed!

setterrain

[x1 y1 x2 y2] (list) | [height floor ceiling] (list) | seed (number) | algorithm (word) OR [algorithm magnification] | style (word)

Creates terrain on the z-plane between the specified x and y co-ordinates.

These co-ordinates represent 10 turtle-units, and the output can be scaled using setterrainresolution.

height specifies the maximum height in terms of single turtle-units, similarly scaled using setterrainresolution. The floor value specifies the lowest level rendered, and any values lower than that value are rendered at the floor level. Similarly, the ceiling value represents the highest value rendered, and anything higher is lowered to that value.

You can open this project in the web-based IDE environment by following this link: /weblogo/pubplayer.html?pub=122

Due to Logo’s enhanced string-handling capabilities and built-in dictionary, making Hangman-style games in turtleSpaces is easy-peasy!

The mechanics of a Hangman game are simple: the computer chooses a word, and then the player chooses letters. If the letters they choose are in the chosen word, then those letters are revealed. If they aren’t in the chosen word, the ‘hanged man’ is built — although these days we probably shouldn’t do that due to nasty historical context, and choose something else.

Past and Future Turtles Part One

Past and Future Turtles Part Two

When Seymour Papert originally conceptualized Logo, he envisioned a language that could be used to demonstrate not just how a computer followed instructions, but how a human being followed instructions, especially those of their own making, and how they developed them. As such, the language has never been successfully optimized for computer execution, as any attempts at doing so tend to defeat the purpose of having the language be easily understandable to a lay human, both to read and write it, without complex formatting or syntax rules.