Getting started with Blockly Turtle

You’re now going to program Blockly Turtle. First, you’ll complete some of the built-in exercises. Then, you’re going to draw a street of houses on your own.

Before you get started with the exercises, you need some further information.

A geometry refresher

There is one piece of maths you’ll need to know to complete the exercises.

The turtle is steered by telling it a number of degrees to turn. There are 360 degrees in a complete rotation. To turn the turtle less than a full rotation, turn it by a fraction of 360. For example, a right angle is 90 degrees, and to face in the opposite direction, the turtle should turn 180 degrees.

Part 1

Firstly, you should complete Levels 1 to 5 in Blockly Turtle. You can find this by selecting ‘Turtle’ on the Blockly Games website.

Complete the exercises as instructed. The Blockly site will let you advance when your code is correct. You’ll see that the Blocks are now tucked away in the grey bar. Select a category heading to see the blocks in that category. For example, on Level 1 you will need one extra block from the ‘Turtle’ category, and one block from the ‘Loops’ category to complete the exercise.

When you have to turn the turtle, the ‘angle’ dropdown will offer a few options to choose from. You can speed up or slow down the turtle’s drawing with the slider under the image. You may find you want to speed up more complex drawings.

Stop at the end of Level 5.

If you want to complete the exercises offline or struggle to access Blockly for other reasons, you can use the more accessible PDF version in the Downloads section. You can write your answers by hand. You may want to open the link in a new browser tab or window so that you can easily return to this page.

Part 2

When you’ve finished Level 5, jump to Level 10 by selecting ‘10’ in the row of exercises at the top of Blockly.

Level 10 is a blank slate for you to draw anything with a much larger set of blocks. Don’t worry, you’re not going to use all of these.

Your next task is to draw a row of houses. A house should look like this:

The house is made of a square and a triangle on the top. Each side of the triangle is the same length, and each side of the triangle is the same length as the sides of the square.

All the blocks you need are in the ‘Turtle’ and ‘Loops’ categories.

Work towards your goal one step at a time:

1. First, draw a square using a repeat loop, like in Level 1. By default, the repeat loop does something 10 times; you can alter this by selecting the ‘10’ in the repeat loop and typing in a different number.

2. Next, draw a triangle on top of it. Use a repeat loop again. You may need to reposition the turtle and angle it before you draw the triangle. Use a repeat loop in your triangle code. (Tip: you will need to turn the turtle 120 degrees at each corner of the triangle.) You should see a house similar to the image above.

3. Now draw a row of houses, with a gap between each house. You’ll need to wrap your code for a single house in a repeat loop. Draw as many houses as you want, but at least three. You will need to lift the pen up and reposition the cursor before the code repeats.

4. As a final touch, why not make your houses different colours? You can find the ‘Set colour to’ and random colour blocks in the ‘Colour’ category.

Summary

If you find the house task challenging, remember that programming is difficult, and you are doing something new. One useful tip if you are stuck working out what to do next, is to imagine you are the turtle. What would you tell yourself to do?