Landmark Decisions
Challenge
Can you make your turtles react to obstacles in their environment? Perhaps you can make your turtles walk along a path that you create, such as the one shown below, by drawing obstacles that guide the turtles.You can paint colors in the turtles’ environment, and then use the following procedure to make the turtles react to the colors as they move:
to check-patches
if pc-ahead = red [rt 180]
if pc-ahead = green [lt 90]
if pc-ahead = blue [rt 90]
end
Try building a StarLogo project that has turtles walking on a particular path or reacting to obstacles in the environment in a meaningful way. Be sure to put the check-patches procedure in the Turtle Procedures Pane. If you want to see an example that uses these commands check out the (3)Bumper Turtles project in the Adventures Projects folder.
Possible Explorations
· As you are drawing obstacles on the screen, consider whether you want the obstacles to take up a lot or a little of the screen.
· Try making slight alterations to the location of your obstacles. How do these modifications affect the paths that the turtles follow?
· Experiment with different path widths and vary the number of turtles simultaneously walking on the path. When you create multiple turtles, do all of them walk the same way?
· Try adding a small amount of randomness to each step as the turtles walk.
· Think about real-world metaphors for the check-patches procedure. What do they suggest about how you might program the turtles or build the obstacles?
For more information contact Vanessa Colella (vanessa@media.mit.edu) or Eric Klopfer (klopfer@mit.edu).