After a few lessons learning how to code with Turtle, this week students learnt how to experiment with angles, length growth and a number of random colours.

The Turtle System is based on Turtle Graphics, an idea invented by Seymour Papert, in which an imaginary turtle moves around the computer screen drawing as it goes, all under the control of instructions given by a computer program.

This sort of programming, and the results it produces, are easy to understand because they are so immediately visual. But the Turtle System provided here shows that Papert‘s idea can go well beyond simple graphics, to provide a basis for fascinating and powerful programs that introduce fundamental concepts of software engineering and artificial intelligence.