A bit of history

Now you’ve taken your first steps with turtle graphics, it’s time to answer a few questions, like:

• Who invented turtle graphics?

• Why is it called a turtle?

• What’s the advantage of turtle graphics?

• Really though, why a turtle 🐢 and not a horse 🐎 or a badger 🦡?

Who invented turtle graphics?

Educator and computer scientist Seymour Papert and his colleagues created a programming language called Logo in 1967, with a specific focus on education. Later this language was used to direct a hemispheric robot which crawled over a large sheet of paper. In the middle of the robot was a pen that could be lowered to draw lines on the paper:

Why is it called a turtle?

Because of the round shape of the robot and the way it crawled across the page it was called a turtle! (Turtle robots weren’t invented by Papert; they had been in use since the 1940s).

What’s the advantage of turtle graphics?

Turtle graphics is a way of the learner (that’s you!) getting active, visual feedback as you learn to program, and is much more engaging than the traditional approach of working with text and numbers.

One important part of the practice of programming is your mental model of what the computer is doing as the program is running. The turtle helps to make this explicit as you learn.

Extra question: Why Python and not Logo?

Python and Logo share a very similar philosophy. They were both designed to provide a gentle learning curve for beginners, and to have code that’s very clear to read. They were also both designed to be powerful for expert users.

These days Logo has fallen out of use except for in education, whereas Python has a wide variety of uses: for example in data analysis, AI and web server code.

Credits

Picture of Papert plus Turtle via Wikimedia: Matematica C3 Algebra DOLCE 1, Testo per il primo biennio della Scuola Secondaria di II grado, prima edizione anno 2014. Pagg. 344. licenza Creative Commons BY: http://www.matematicamente.it/staticfiles/manuali-cc/algebra1_dolce_1ed.pdf