Today I had fifth graders and was curious to try out something new. I split up the 2 hours course into one hour of Turtle Art followed by one hour to create Memory games.
In my introduction course into turtle art I make use of following geometrical figures: a square and a circle. So before starting to work with the computers I repeat the preferences of a square (four equal sides and four equal angles (90 degree angles, or right angles) and of a circle (full circle 360 degree and a quarter circle 90 degree). Then I let them start the computer and TurtleArt (Interesting - several of the kids thought that the activity TurtleArt icon was an alarm clock). I explain briefly that the turtle is a pen they can draw with by using programming blocks.
First, I show the students how to instruct the turtle to move forward N steps.
Then how the turtle can turn the direction. Starting from 90 degrees then changing the value to 45 degrees. Here one can go back to the discussion of the circle and how many times I have to click on the programming block that the turtle does a full circle. Often, I see the kids having issues to understand that the turtle does turn without moving forward.
Then I want everyone to draw a square using the two instructions, “go forward” and “turn right”.
The transfer part of this exercise is to draw an octogon.
The concept of loops I introduce with the words: “Programmers are lazy people, and we always try to let the computer do the work. Instead of clicking 4 times on the instruction box, one can use a loop to get the work done.”
And for the transfer the octogon.
Let’s go one step further and combine two loops. In the next program we have an inner and and outer loop. The inner loop is still the same from the previous exercise. After drawing a square or octogon we turn the turtle by 10 degrees. To do a full circle we need to do that 36 times. The outer loop does do the inner one 36 times.
To make things more colorful, one can change the color after drawing an object. The color value can be the current direction, which works nicely in this example.
The students did follow quite well and repeated the examples I showed. I did let some time for manipulating the examples and let them try by themselves. Some really nice pictures were the result.
Pretty impressive how far one can get in one hour with turtle art. The class teacher explained me that the kids would learn circle and radius this semester. I think we had a great first introduction into geometry in that one hour course. The students did get the concepts really well and all in all I think they had some fun too.
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