Generative Art with TurtleArt

I made a series of drawings with the LogoTurtle a while back and I am revisiting the same idea of "exploded shapes" using Turtle Art. With this simple idea:

Strobing Zoetrope v2, Now With Logo!

This project started during my participation in Design Do Discover 2017. At the end of my post about it I said I wanted to try making it work with a mashup of LightLogo and LogoTurtle and now I have! In this phase of making a zoetrope with a spinning disk of animation frames and a strobing light source, the project has gotten several upgrades:

Sharing the LogoTurtle at World Maker Faire

• A 10 year-old boy who had never programmed in Logo saw the square example and immediately saw how he could modify it to make different shapes and nest that loop in another loop to make the multiple tiled shapes on the left. His dad was floored by what he did so quickly on his own. He left with his family for a while and came back a couple hours later and added to his octagon program to make the shape in the video. Amazing, he had been thinking about it while walking around and wanted to pursue his other ideas about it.

Learning From the LogoTurtle

Teaching with the LogoTurtle was an experiment for me last spring. I knew there would be a lot for my high school robotics students to learn from it but I didn't exactly know what. At the end of our LogoTurtle unit I asked the students to write about what they felt like they learned. I didn't prompt them to write about any specific aspect of their learning, I just wanted to see what would come out. I've been thinking about what they wrote and realized a few things; 1) each student is on her own learning adventure, 2) the LogoTurtle is actually teaching them as much as, and maybe more than, I am, and 3) what are often called the soft skills of learning-resilience, collaboration, making mistakes, perseverance-were a significant part of the experience for them.

Bits to Atoms: Reversing Skewed Triangle

Python Turtle:


LogoTurtle:

More Generative Art with the LogoTurtle

My first idea for making generative art with Drawson, my LogoTurtle, was along these lines. Here are a couple more ideas I am playing with. These are a little harder to code than the earlier "exploded shapes." My fascination with these is split between finding the beauty in the shapes that come out of them and in the process by which the overall composition is built up over time out of small random decisions.

Add an LED to your LogoTurtle

Erin Riley has a great project using an LED throwy and taking a long exposure picture of her LogoTurtle in a dark box to make drawings with light. So we put our heads together and found a way to add an LED directly into the LogoTurtle's circuitry so you can add on and off commands for it in your drawing program. Here's how!

LogoTurtle: Get Mac OS Working with the Adafruit Metro Mini

Getting a Mac to run LogoTurtle on the Logo Floor Turtle robot can be challenging. Windows users can run the LogoTurtle assembler program on the Adafruit Metro Mini right out of the box. But it was discovered that the Metro ships with a pre-loaded sketch that wreaks havoc on a Mac computer if it is not first overwritten by a simple Arduino sketch like Blink. Something about how Mac handles USB serial communication. Note that once you replace the sketch it ships with and load the Logo Assembler on one computer, you should be able to skip the Assembler and run LogoTurtle on any other Mac. If you are setting up several LogoTurtles, say, for a classroom or workshop, you might want load Blink then the Logo Assembler on all your Metros from one Mac, then any other Macs people use should be able to go straight to opening LogoTurtle and getting down to coding.

Generative Art with the LogoTurtle

The LogoTurtle is a programmable turtle that can draw. I like running simple programs with small aspects of randomness because the resulting drawings are always a surprise, and often beautiful. When randomness is part of a program the robot will draw a different composition every time, but it's also fun to look at several drawings resulting from the same program and see the similarities. The robot is enacting controlled chaos, and both the controlled parameters and the chaos within those limits can be seen after several runs. I also like how the robot is a kind of partner in creativity as it makes its own decisions within the framework it's been given.