Kids Coding Lesson Using Python Turtles: Today YOU be the computer…

My first serious contact with computer code occured in the early 80’s, using a drawing program known as Logo. Our elementary school had a small computer lab, which we were allowed to use a few times per week. The premise of Logo was simple: the user controls a “Turtle”, which was moved around the screen to draw lines and fill in shapes. Kids being kids, we started off drawing the nice shapes suggested by our teachers and things quickly devolved into a contest to see who could make the turtle move fastest…

One recent Saturday morning, I introduced my children to the ideas behind Logo, using Python’s turtles library. This is a good (free!) recreation of the program I remember and, better yet, is included as part of Python’s standard library. To use it, type “import turtles” at the interpreter prompt and you’re good to go…

Incidently, this was not a hardcore programming lesson. While I dearly hope my kids will someday debate the merits of using object oriented vs functional programming, we had a simpler set of goals. With young kids, you’ve got to keep the lesson fun and tangible. There were a couple of basic programming ideas I wanted to slip in along the way:

  • Using variables to store a value
  • Using if-then statements to control the flow of a program
  • Looping / Iteration (just for loops for now)
  • The importance of good comments…

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