These two exercises are all about diving into python and getting our hands dirty. The first is getting a program to ask for user input. The second is to make the coolest Turtle program you can and post it to our blog.

Custom Input for Turtles

Make a program that:

• prompts the user for a color and makes a Turtle that color
• prompts the user for a background color and makes it that color

To prompt the user for input we’ll need Python’s raw_input() function. We haven’t learned about functions yet, but since we’re diving in we’re just going to use it and see what happens.

Read up a little on some of the results from a quick Google search:

• Python’s official docs for raw_input
• Stack overflow question

Like much of the documentation we’ll find in programming, these imply or depend on a lot of background knowledge you may or may not have. Push on even if you don’t understand and see what happens in the code! I’ll mention a few things that might help.

raw_input gets a value, and we have to store it somewhere to use it in our program. That’s why in the example on Stack Overflow there’s an assignment of the statement to a variable. For example, we might store the result like this:

tina_color = raw_input("What color should Tina be?")

This will cause a window to pop up asking “What color should Tina be?” and save the user input into the variable. We can then use the tina_color variable later, in place of something like "red" or etc.

Using this information, knock out the two components of the exercise above.

Turtlehacking

Now that we know a little about how to make Turtles do cool stuff, let’s hack them!

The Turtle library is code that someone else wrote for us. You can see the full extent of that code here. We went over lots of the Turtle module’s functionality in class, and you can find more if you’re interested online.

Use what we learned and what you discover about turtle to make a second program. This program should be as cool as possible, whatever that means to you. During the next class we’ll embed this program into a post on our class blog and there will be an opportunity for quick code talks to show off what you did.