From Tangible Turtle

Tangible Turtle

An aspect of the original logo that always stuck around with me was the presence of a physical turtle that would obey the commands it was given. I always felt that this made programing in logo that much more impacting because something in the physical world responded to the commands issued in the program. In Tangible Turtle I decided to make the commands tangible instead. I chose to do this for many reasons centered around the idea that tangible objects would be easier to relate to than a computer program. This is especially true for younger children and those who are not comfortable using a computer. With tangible commands users would not have to worry about syntax or spelling, two things that often discourage people who are starting to program.

The Light table

So with all this coding i haven’t paid much attention to the light table component. The development of this project has taken up a great deal of my time and I’m struggling to finish it in time. The projection table in particular has been difficult to create. My prototypes have been made out of cardboard boxes and i have been trying to find out what materials can be projected onto it, but can still read the markers from the other side. So far, cloth and regular paper has not worked. I will try tracing paper tomorrow. I managed to get my external camera running by installing a third party driver. However the driver does not play nicely with the reactivision program and is too choppy to work. I will look into another webcam tomorrow.

Do my bidding!

Finished implementing the first couple of commands for my logoblocks project. Forward and Backwards now move a third always present block(the turtle) across the screen. The turn command, however, is giving me some problems. In theory simply setting the turtle’s angle to that of a given block should be easy. However, when rendering, there seems to be some other actions taking place. These other actions are not simply changing my turtle’s rotation, but causing it to spin, sometimes quite rapidly. hopefully this will be resolved soon.picture-4

getting the objects to be recognized

Spent a lot of time reading the api for the TuioObjects and how they are received. I was able to create a program that, similar to the example, draws the recognized blocks onto a screen and tags them with a number. This wasn’t too difficult but given the fact that I am doing what others have done before, and that I can ask questions about my approach. When I further develop this to do things that others have not tried i expect there to be problems.picture-3