On Nov 17, 2006, at 8:42 AM, John Zelle wrote:
On Friday 17 November 2006 8:07 am, Ernesto Costa wrote:
Hi,
Returning to the question of a "good" module about graphics. I'm
using Zohn Zelle's book for my course. It has a interesting and
simple to use graphics module. It would be nice if that module could
be "merged" with xturtle i.e to incorporate a turtle class that use
the graphics canvas :-)!
One project that we often use in my classes is writing a simple
turtle module
on top of graphics.py. It's a great exercise for introducing
students to
writing their own classes. Still, I have to say that xturtle looks
very
interesting, and this might be a great combination. I haven't
looked at
xturtle's implementation in any detail, so I don't have any sense
on how hard
such a merger would be.
--John
Hi,
I've been using Gregor's xturtle in my CS 1 class this fall, along
with John's CS1 text. Although this is a college course the students
do not have any prior programming experience.
I have found that it is a really nice way to introduce students to
the concept of using an object. Creating instances, calling methods
etc. We have used xturtle for several projects including:
- drawing a sierpinski triangle
- drawing simple scenes
- plotting simple functions I extended xturtle to have a
setWorldCoordinates method that works like the like the
setWorldCoords method in John's graphics.py. After we do the scaling
and translation for ourselves once, its nice to let the system do it
for us the rest of the time.
- "bouncing turtles" moving multiple turtles around a box, bouncing
off the walls and other turtles
- classic video game xturtle has an onClick, onTimer, and onKey
function that lets you setup callbacks for those three event types.
Using a turtle or turtles as a sprite the students were able to make
some really fun classic games like pong, space invaders, asteroids
Now, we are learning how to write our own classes and we are
implementing a set of classes that look like the those defined in
graphics.py. Behind the scenes we are using xturtle to create the
window and do the real drawing. I have used graphics.py in past
years to build a turtle, so this year we are doing the opposite. So
far I like doing it this way because graphics is such a natural
object oriented application and the inheritance hierarchy for shapes
is such a nice one.
I also like using turtle graphics when I'm teaching recursion.
Brad
--
John M. Zelle, Ph.D. Wartburg College
Professor of Computer Science Waverly, IA
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (319) 352-8360
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Bradley Miller
Assistant Professor Computer Science
Luther College
Decorah, IA 52101
http://www.cs.luther.edu/~bmiller
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