Logo

Downhill Skiing exercises Logo’s list handling capabilities and leverages turtleSpaces 3D functionality to create an engaging yet simple game.

Once loaded, click the flag icon to start.

Click here to open this project in the web IDE.

Herein lies a wonderful introduction to game development in turtleSpaces. The game mechanic behind downhill is simple: the player travels down the ski slope, avoiding randomly-positioned trees while shifting left and right to end in the target zone.

This simple yet attention-grabbing Logo procedure is a real visual treat, creating random three-dimensional ‘flowers’ based on the sine function. This could spice up a math class or just provide a brief introduction to sine waves in general.

The procedure makes use of the move primitive, which allows the turtle to move based on an arbitrary number of degrees away from its current heading, on the X and Y planes. When combined with the sine function, it produces these interesting ‘natural’ 3D designs.

When I was a young child, one of my best friends was a turtle.

Not a real turtle, although that would have been fun, but a virtual one. My turtle lived inside of an Apple II, an early 8-bit computer, at my elementary school.

When I first met her, my turtle, she didn’t do much. She just sat there. It didn’t take long for me to realize that in order to get her to do something, I would need to prompt her. To do this, there was a literal prompt on the screen, beckoning me to type something.

The FRAG primitive creates a filled shape out of the current turtle position and her last two positions. For example:

FD 100 RT 90 FD 100 FRAG

will create a triangle.

While turtleSpaces has a variety of shape primitives, sometimes you need to create an arbitrary shape, and FRAG aids you in this.

Take this example, which draws a star:

TO star
  repeat 4 [
    forward 100
    right 170
    forward 86
    frag
    left 70
    forward 86
    right 170
    forward 100
    frag
    right 180
  ]

Don’t want to download the turtleSpaces client just yet? Well, you can take turtleSpaces for a bit of a spin using Myrtlebot, our turtleSpaces Twitter Bot! Myrtlebot executes whatever Logo code (not procedures yet) you tweet at her, and then returns an image of the results. In the future, we plan to allow for the recording of movies, but for now it’s just a still image. If your code runs for more than 60 seconds, it will be cut off at the 60 second mark.

Logo is great for creating art! And 3D Logo makes it even better.

Many of these Logo artworks were inspired by examples created by Seymour Papert’s daughter Artemis Papert using the two-dimensional block-based TurtleArt application developed by LCSI Logo developer Brian Silverman. We’re grateful for both of their efforts in advancing Logo over the past several decades!

TO adobo
  reset setpenwidth 5 definecolor 16 [0 0 0]
  setpc 16 setbg 1 setbs 12 pu
  repeat 9 [
    repeat 10 [
      setpos {-120 + 20 * repcount -120 + 20 * repabove 1}
      setz -2 + 0.01 * random 400
      setfc pick [8 9 13]
      setfs -13 + random 10
      setheading -5 + random 11
      square 40 box 40
    ]
  ]
END

After a year of work, we are pleased to make available to the public our new Logo interpreter, turtleSpaces.

turtleSpaces implements the Logo programming language inside of the OpenGL 3D graphics environment, allowing you to use turtles to construct 3D models and create animations, simulations and games.

We initially implemented a version of Apple Logo II in our microM8 Apple II emulator to make it easier to use for our younger users, and because microM8 itself uses OpenGL to render the Apple II’s graphics (also in 3D) we added some rudimentary 3D commands to it (up, down, rollleft, rollright, etc.)