ScreenTurtle (Topologika)

My first package for Topologika was ScreenTurtle. Another crusade. I've always seen logo as a valuable educational tool and used it extensively in the middle school in which I taught. Back in the BBC days we used Logo Challenge - not a full version of the language, but a sort of warm fuzzy thing that was a little more forgiving than the original.

With the power of an A3000 available it seemed that the idea of a 'friendly' programming language was a possibility. I started with the language itself and implemented (nice long word) a version that had all the commands I thought children at primary and lower secondary level would need to explore turtle geometry and problem solving. Then I added a parser to the input routine.

This meant that ScreenTurtle was able to recognise a variety of version of the same command; Forward could also be Forwards, Ahead, FD etc. Not only that, if a command was misspelled, ScreenTurtle will take a guess at what the user meant. Add to that plenty of helpful error messages, a tolerance of too many spaces between words and on-screen help and I aimed to have a program that would let children use the language without the interface getting in the way.

I think it worked. It has since been released in a desktop version called, imaginatively enough, Desktop ScreenTurtle.