Activities/Turtle Art/Extras

Extras

Keyboard shortcuts

  • Ctrl+q quit (exit Turtle Art)
  • Alt+p show/hide the palettes
  • Alt+b show/hide the blocks
  • Alt+r run the 'start' stack rapidly
  • Alt+w run the 'start' stack slowly (and highlight blocks during execution)
  • Alt+s stop execution of the stack
  • Alt+e erase the screen
  • Esc return from full-screen mode
  • Ctrl+c copy a stack of blocks or text from a block
  • Ctrl+v paste a stack of blocks or text into a block
  • cursor (arrow) keys (or h j k l keys) move selected stack of blocks or turtle or move between toolbar items
  • Return (Enter) is used to run a stack of blocks or to select a toolbar item
  • space selects the next block (in the order in which they were added) (only in version 100+)

Note for OLPC-XO laptop users: the buttons on the display can also be used.

  • The left-hand buttons can be used to move a stack of blocks or turtle
  • o button runs the selected stack of blocks or returns the selected turtle to the home position (center of the screen)
  • × button deletes the selected stack of blocks
  • ✓ button runs the 'start' stack
  • ◽ button selects the next block (in the order in which they were added) (only in version 100+)

Copying and Pasting

Did you know that you can copy/paste stacks to/from the clipboard? You type Ctrl-C to copy whatever stack is under the cursor to the clipboard. Ctrl-V will paste from the clipboard onto whatever TA project you have open. Try pasting this code into your Turtle Art project.

[[0, "clean", 258, 217, [12, 1]],
 [1, "repeat", 258, 251, [0, 2, 3, null]],
 [2, ["number", 36], 309, 251, [1, null]],
 [3, "repeat", 323, 311, [1, 4, 5, 9]],
 [4,  ["number", 4], 374, 311, [3, null]],
 [5, "forward", 388, 371, [3, 6, 7]],
 [6, ["number", 300], 459, 371, [5, null]],
 [7, "right", 388, 413, [5, 8, null]],
 [8, ["number", 90], 446, 413, [7, null]],
 [9, ["vspace", 20], 323, 389, [3, 10]],
 [10, "right", 323, 463, [9, 11, null]],
 [11, ["number", 10], 381, 463, [10, null]],
 [12, "start", 258, 175, [null, 0]]]

You can also paste text from the clipboard into text blocks.

Note: You can duplicate individual blocks with copy and paste, when duplicating a text block, deselect the text block after copying if you want to duplicate the block rather than duplicating the text within the block.

Speed

Turtle Art has three 'run' buttons:

  • The 'rabbit' button will run your program at full screen. Note: It will highlight blocks during execution, so your program will run much faster if you hide blocks.
  • The 'turtle' button will run your program with a slight delay between blocks. Block are highlighted as they are executed and block labels are updated with the current block values.
  • The 'debug' button will run your program with a longer delay between blocks. Block are highlighted as they are executed and block labels are updated with the current block values.

Sharing

Turtle Art supports a simple sharing model. Whomever joins a shared activity will share turtles with the other participants, e.g., whatever any turtle draws will appear on every screen. Share can consume a lot of network bandwidth, so it is not recommended to share among more than 2–3 people at a time if the screen is frequently changing. As with all Sugar activities, you can use the Share-with feature of the Journal to share your Turtle Art projects with others.

Note: as of Version 83, Turtle Art will not share correctly with older versions.

Note: as of Version 106, Turtle Art will share between Sugar and GNOME.

Running Turtle Art outsde of Sugar

 

Turtle Art can be run in the GNOME desktop outside of Sugar.

PC HARDWARE:

  • Download Turtle Art (as a *.xo archive)
  • Extract the TurtleArt.activity directory from the archive, eg drag it to the desktop
  • Open directory TurtleArt.activity
  • Run turtleart.py (run in terminal is better, you can see error messages there)

OLPC XO HARDWARE

  • The XO1.5 and later software builds for the XO1.0 allow switching between Gnome and Sugar desktops. The following assumes that Turtle Art is already installed in Sugar.
  • Switch to the Gnome desktop
  • open olpc's home on the desktop
  • open Activities
  • on later software builds, Activities is both hidden and locked, if so, check show hidden files to unhide, in terminal chmod 777 Activities to unlock
  • open TurtleArt.activity
  • run turtleart.py (run in terminal is better, you can see error messages there)