From 100 Days of Code to Ideas for Geometry Projects with Turtle

After having finished the beginner section of 100 Days of Code Python Bootcamp on Udemy I decided to push on and to explore the remaining 85 days of coding as well. A vacation intervened with this but now I managed to continue the lessons and finished days 16-18 which are about Object Oriented Programming. Day 18 introduces the turtle graphics package for geometric drawing. I had never used it myself, mainly because most of my programming tasks have centered around processing data and most visualization I needed so far was covered by plotting in matplotlib. I had the odd occassion where I was thinking about plotting data inside a circle as a physical representation of measurements collected on a circular object but I never pursued it further. On the homefront I have been doing some mathematics exercises with my kids and in geometry obviously encountered all the standard shapes. So far I have drawn in paper notebooks and in OneNote. Drawing standard shapes in OneNote is quite easy but if you want to accurately draw an angle in a triangle for example this seems not very straight forward. For archiving and sharing purposes a digital notebook has my preference over paper and I have been looking into css to draw shapes. Together with markdown I could write some notebook like pages but I have only scratched the surface on what is possible and it seems to require some digging to determine exactly how to do this. In Python, using the Turtle package it obviously requires reading sections in the documentation but apart from that it seems straight forward to get what I need fast. So this possible opens up the alternative route of creating a Jupyter notebook to create worked problems in geometry that I can share with my children. These could even be interactive such that parameters can be changed and you can immediately see how that impacts the result. So far the exercises in the Bootcamp training have been mostly fun visual tasks creating multicoloured regular polygons, spirographs and random walks which mainly served to introduce Turtle and the possibilities. But I see some useful applications for my home projects already. That is already another day in the bootcamp well spent: nice!