Move The Turtle is an app that especially works well on a tablet. Programming for kids on the iPad, in a simple and fun form.
Should the concept of Move The Turtle(official homepage over here) seem familiar to you in the distance, then that may be true. In the past – the eighties of the last century – there was another educational programming language in circulation on many home computers: Logo (incidentally already released in 1967!). Logo, however, used hand-typed code, as usual in those days. The idea was that you controlled a – highly stylized – turtle here by means of your code. You could make beautiful drawings that way, for example. And that without in-depth knowledge of machine code, which was often required for those kinds of jobs. Try it yourself (again)? Then check this page. Move The Turtle for iOS / iPadOS is actually an upgrade to 2020, using blocks of code. We also know this trick from the popular Scratch (the official successor to Logo). Where, incidentally, a special version for the very youngest is also available with the name for iOS / iPadsOS Scratch Jr. Incidentally, all these types of programming apps look best on the larger screen of the iPad.
Learning through play
Move The Turtle is a lovely educational programming language. Launch the app and tap on the main screen Play. You then end up in a kind of game mode in which you learn to program with the app in a playful way. By completing a level you unlock higher levels and so on. The first level is simple: try to take a diamond with the – luckily real looking – turtle at this time. For that you have to add a move command via the plus button in the program list on the left.
You can then set the distance that the Move command has to cover with a slider. Everything is neatly explained, so the user is really taken by the hand. To run your – now extremely simple – program, click Play. As with the Logo mentioned earlier, you can let the turtle draw its tracks (default behavior). The line color can be adjusted with a dedicated command block, but pen up and pen down are also available.
More and more possibilities are gradually being unlocked. Repeat procedures, for example. With which, of course, more complex graphics can quickly be unlocked. You can save your programs – also during the game – so that you can (re) use them later in your own program. Such a program piece is called a procedure that you can call again later. So you build your own libraries that way!
Examples
If you have completed the introductory lessons and you want to get started yourself, this is of course possible. click on Menu top left of the screen. It is nice to have a look at the demo programs first. There are some very nice things in between and you also learn from the pre-baked code in those demos (under Projects). For the advanced we even find demos with which fractals are drawn, as if that might be a bridge too far for the very youngest. View them with a click and then View. Fortunately, there are also much simpler demos such as drawing a circle. Since Move The Turtle does not have a native command for drawing such a circle, it takes some thought. The solution is simply to move the turtle forward a little bit, turn a few degrees, move it again and so on. How much forward and how much turn? That is another nice math question! The demo code reveals it a bit.
And oh yes: if you change the value 10 (the angle of rotation) into the question mark ? (which stands for random values) changes, you are guaranteed to get creative chaos as the end result. Always fun. Oh yes: if you find a program very slow, you will find three speed buttons at the bottom right of the blackboard (the playing field of the turtle). The highest speed is useful for viewing more complex drawings, for example. While the slowest setting is perfect to see what your program is doing exactly.
Musical
It is not only image that our virtual turtle can produce, he (she?) Also turns out to be musical. Open the sample app OctaveSounds but once through View. When you start the program you will hear a scale. You get it: this way you can of course program your own songs. By the way, a piano is used as an instrument, so that’s always a good thing (and a big improvement on the bleeps and beeps from the Logo era).
Get started all by yourself
If you want to create your own program from scratch, first tap the top left again as many times as necessary to return to the main Move The Turtle window. Then tap Compose. You are now completely on your own. To be honest, it is very fun to play with this for a while. Even as an adult by the way, although we eventually recommend Scratch on something like a raspberry, because you can also control some things (LEDs, a motor via a buffer, etc.). At Move The Turtle you are stuck to the blackboard. But especially for children, it is good for hours of playing and learning fun.
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