During the last two weeks of December, Mr. Dembo’s 7th Grade CSAI class was challenged with creating a winter-themed project. It could be anything from Christmas trees to snowflakes.
For my project, I created a penguin. This is how it looks:
The penguin is wearing a Santa hat (Christmas themed), and, since it is a penguin, it is also winter themed.
I had a couple of challenges trying to complete the project. My first challenge was making the feet. Creating a teardrop-type-shape was not easy, and sometimes when I would fill the shape, it would fill half or leave a gap of white in someplace. I also struggled with making the body. I had at least three iterations until I came up with something I liked.
During the first two weeks of December, I created a maze that a turtle could go through. The maze reset every time one were to click play, so the turtle was tasked to go through the maze following the newly created patterns.
I practiced calling lists using loops with the [i] command.
I challenged myself to complete the maze using the goto command and not the forward and turn commands. At first, I could not figure out why it was not working, but then I realized I had to put a -400 before my code in order to make the goto command work.
The first time I completed the maze, I completed it using forward commands, but it “bounced” off the wall. I realized that it would probably work if I used 400 + randomr[i}… The second time, I used goto command. It works, but it is not smooth.
Last week in class, I created a turtle race as apart of a challenge. I learned how to change the shape of turtles, turning the turtle into a turtle. I also learned about time and random imports.
The challenge was not a difficult one. I already knew how to use most of the commands such as functions, goto() commands, and if functions. The challenge that I did have is getting the turtles to stop at the finish line. I kept getting an error that I could not fix. Little did I know that all I had to do was make another repeat and then put the code that was getting an error inside it.
Something I wish I would have done if I knew how was to put all of the rats into a dictionary and call their properties. I could put them into a dictionary, but I could not call their properties without getting an error.
This is my inspired art project I created in class for CSAI. I created my inspired art off of spider in book two and zig from the Turtle Art Gallery. The background represents the lines from the project zig. The flower represents the black lines from the project spider.
I changed the original projects to match what I envisioned for the outcome.
I liked how the pattern in zig looked, so I wanted to recreate my own version of it. Since the code was not provided, I had to create my own code for it. This was a time-consuming part because I had to decide how many times it should repeat, where it should be shown, and how I execute it. I started off by making the lines. I decided that it was hideous so I made the lines have a random block that makes them have different size lines. Then I wanted it to be similar to zig with the way that the colors start off light and become slowly darker. I tried to do this with a random color block. I got really confused with trying that out. Sanvi gave me an idea to use the shade block, and that made a lot more sense for what I was trying to complete. If I were to do this again I would try to make it take less time to load the background because it takes roughly five minutes to load making it time-consuming to debug.
I liked how spider turned out. I attempted to recreate it, but instead of having it look like spirals, I made it look like a flower. The circle was the easiest part of this, but on the other hand, the flower petals took forever to do. I wanted to make both sides of the petals wavy, but when after multiple attempts, I went with making it kind of curvy. Before deciding upon the idea of making them sort-of curvy, the petals would go in random directions and would interlace one another. I liked how the petals would interlace the circle forming a mini-circle. It reminded me of a sunflower.
During the week of September 13, I created my name in Turtle Art. Writing my name in script was the hardest part, especially connecting the letters. The colors overlapped in some places too, which frustrated me. The hardest part was defiantly the arcs. That was the most time consuming part out of the whole thing. I could not figure out how to get the arcs to curve a certain way, as you can tell with the ‘y’ and the ‘e.’ The ‘a’ was also a difficult letter because I struggled trying to get the transition from the circle to the arc to the letter ‘r.’ Unlike the name, the background was quite easy. I did not know what to do with it, though, so I decided to add my representation of sprinkles there to fill up the white space. It fit in nicely with the sunset color scheme of the name. I wish I would have separated the code into action blocks to make it easier to read because that would have saved a lot of time with debugging.
Finished ProductThe code used (click image to enlarge)
Last week I created a house using a block code editor known as Turtle Art. It took me a while to figure out how to align the roof with the base of the house. Making the base of the house was not that difficult, and the door was easy to make besides the fact that I had to test out different numbers to align it in the center. Since the windows were the last thing I did, it was easy to make them. I used action blocks to make the code smaller.
Hello, my name is Skyelar. I have been at Quest since the middle of fifth grade. I enjoy math, and I play the flute. Outside of school, I do taekwondo. I am currently a black belt in taekwondo and testing for my first degree soon. My favorite television show is Big Brother, and I watch it with my family.
