Here’s the program I’m embedding:

Careful, my turtle program may induce seizures…Some people find it captivating, others nauseating. Unfortunately, I’m one of the latter.

I started writing this program by Googling “python turtle tricks.” This pulled up some optical illusions based on loops that I tested. After several trippy results, I found a design that looked interesting (https://michael0x2a.com/blog/turtle-examples). After observing how the loop works, I was able to modify the lengths and colors to produce something that looked like a sun. After playing around more, I saw that I could turn it into an eye as well. Then, I thought about putting a star in the middle of the iris to suggest “starry eyed.”

The hardest part was creating a star. I started by Googling and found a discussion about creating a filled star. Though many people offered suggestions, none of them were quite right as it was difficult to fill in the entire star. I tried a bunch of different approaches, including a loop that drew a spiral star. In the end, I decided to draw a pentagon and then draw 5 triangles with 70-70-40 angles. My rusty math skills meant that I was unable to find a neat solution so I just knuckled-down and did everything by trial-and-error. As a result, the star is passable, but not perfect. If I had better spatial reasoning, maybe I could have figured out a neater way to accomplish the result.

Despite my sad star, I did make some strides toward incorporating our lessons into this program. I was able to write a loop to draw the pentagon and use a prompt and a variable to allow viewers to customize their star. I hope to use these skills to write a more complicated program in the future.