1.4. Compute with Turtles¶
The idea of “turtle programming” dates back to the 1960’s and originated with Seymour Papert. He developed a robot turtle with a physical pen in it. Children would steer the robot around and create drawings with the pen by writing programs in a language called Logo.
Children playing with a Logo turtle robot that could draw with a pen¶
Today, we can play with virtual turtles in a fully-graphical and non-robotic way. To do so, we
will make use of another feature of Python - code libraries. A library is a collection of
existing code designed to help programs perform some task. Using a library means we do not have
to figure out how to handle all the details of a particular problem - the library code will
take care of many of those details for us. In the case of making a virtual turtle, our program
will need to have a way to keep track of where the turtle is, a way to move the turtle around,
a way to draw to the screen, etc… The turtle library will handle these details for us.
To use a library, we need to tell Python we want to use the library with an import statement.
In the program below, we start with import turtle to tell Python we want to make use
of the turtle library. To use commands from the library, we use dot notation: we type the
name of the library, then a dot ., then the command.
The line alex = turtle.Turtle() calls the Turtle() command from the turtle library to
make a new turtle - we name that turtle alex.
The turtles that we make are objects that have behaviors we can access
with dot-notation. We use these to tell the turtle alex to move around on the screen using
commands like: alex.forward(150). As the turtle moves around it draws a line behind itself.
Try clicking the 
button below to see what the following program does.
Just by going forward, backward, left, and right, we can have a turtle draw a shape: