Hi Processing,

George Bashi (http://georgebashi.com) and I, Ollie Glass (http://ollieglass.com), are pleased to announce the release of our PTurtle library at http://pturtle.sourceforge.net

From the website:

"The PTurtle library provides a turtle drawing object in Processing. Designed with LOGO's educational principles in mind, the turtle presents uncomplicated commands and an intuitive metaphor to the new programmer. Teaching with the turtle offers a gentle introduction to the imperative, procedural and abstract thinking skills needed by new programmers.

As well as the standard forwards, backwards and turn commands, the turtle can draw with Processing-like moveToward commands that take x and y co-ordinates. For the teacher and student, these methods ease the transition from first-person turtle geometry to Processing's Euclidian geometry.

For more advanced learners, the library offers a HistoryTurtle which stores the lines it draws and makes them available for editing. The HistoryTurtle contains a publicly accessible ArrayList holding individual Line objects, extending the turtle metaphor and providing a visual way in to using objects and collections in Processing."

The library has been developed for use in our introduction to Processing workshops, where it's been tested and refined to it's current mature, bug-free (we believe!) state. It's proved invaluable in teaching the basics of programming and Processing to students. We hope that you enjoy it too, however you use it, and we welcome your feedback.

Ollie Glass & George Bashi

http://pturtle.sourceforge.net

Hi Casey,

thanks for your interest and your question. We use the turtle library from the start in our workshops and we want students' first experiences of programming to be with typical Java / Processing code. It's empowering for them to write "real" code from the beginning; abbreviated commands are convenient and faithful to LOGO, but they're uncommon in Java and could give the impression that programming needs to be simplified if it's to be made accessible. Processing has done a lot to dispel that idea and we want to continue in that vein.

Ollie

nice lib and site.
would you add your staff something like the followings?
these are my old sketches.

3D turtle
http://www.geocities.jp/classiclll_newweb/KAMEPainter3D/applet/index.html
turtle on a planet
http://www.geocities.jp/classiclll_newweb/KAMEonPlanet/applet/index.html
turtle having canpas
http://www.geocities.jp/classiclll_newweb/KAMEtheBillboard/applet/index.html

hi there, this is very nice. to run the examples i had to import pturtle.Turtle; instead of import turtle.Turtle; and they worked fine.
i am just worried, that the naming does conflict with the convention of using prefix P only for "official" things that are inside processing.core and other associated classes. but chaning the name of pturtle would then also affect your current sourceforge url. any suggestions?

hi ollie,
sorry for my delayed reply. ironically 2 of my libraries do fall under the suffix-issue as well. for libraries i am working on now, i decided to use an 's' as prefix - giving up the P5 suffix. doing so, my future libs might be less connected to processing in its naming convention but more connected towards the author.  i do see that it might be useful to have a dedicated prefix or suffix that makes it easier to identify processing libraries, yet i dont know if it should be a requirement - but an option. what do others think? (maybe this should continue in its own thread?)
best,
andreas