Today in maths we exploring geometry in micro worlds. So if you don’t know what micro worlds is it’s an app with a whole range of different things to do on it such as drawing pictures and animated scenes, presenting things and much more but today we were doing turtles and geometry. Turtles and geometry is basically where you have a turtle and write down programs to give it instructions or commands to make it do something. But today it is not actually about commanding your turtle but learning about geometry. On the app there is a command that is called pd witch mean pen down so it means you can draw shapes with the turtle to learn about geometry.
When we were on the floor we were drawing a trapezium on micro worlds and discovered that on a trapezium the four angles on it swapped the degrees on the inside and the outside angle each time. Because we went forward 100 then turned right 67 degrees went forward 200 then we had to work out how much to turn next. So what we did was we degrees worked out how much it was to 180 witch was 113 so it meant we had to turn 113 degrees. Then we moved the turtle forward to reach the end but I think you get the idea of the angles. Just in case here’s a photo of my own trapezium.
In micro worlds today we were given the challenge of trying to make the anitals with the turtle just by drawing it with the pen down command.
We would have to make a procedure that the turtle could understand and follow the instructions. Mine are J.W so I had the challenge of having to make a curved shape but with the knowledge of how to make a circle in micro worlds it helped me a lot.
But that’s not it, not only were we supposed to draw our anitals but to and draw it in block writing as well so we had to do a whole other part to it. The first letter I drew was J witch was easy to start of with because all I did was draw a straight line and add a semi circle onto the end of it witch has the same commands as the circle but it only repeats it 180 times.
but as soon I got the block writing it got hard as I didn’t know how to do the other semi circle because it was going to be smaller than the original one. So I tried experimenting with how much turn and distance but it would either make it too big or would end up making a full circle. Then I tried instead of having 180 I tried 90 because it’s half of 180 and I only needed a small dip in it so it would be perfect and it was so that was the real challenge. But I didn’t get time to start the W so that’s what I’ll be working on next lesson.
This session we were back doing micro worlds but this time we were looking into how setpos and the cartizien plain works. If you don’t know what he cartiezien plain is it is a tool used to help locate things or draw maps and other things too it basically the thing in battle ships that’s used to locate your enemies.
So we were using it as a command for the turtle to tell it where to go without putting in a bunch of commands just for it to get to a certain area. We would do this by using setpos witch is basically a cartizien plain. To measure the cartizien plain it is split into four different parts the bottom left corner is negative negative and the top left corner is negative positive, the bottom right corner is positive negative and the top right corner is positive positive. We used this to make lots of different shapes in different places of the plain. I think it could quite useful in other projects to come in micro worlds.