# The &kturtle; Handbook

Cies Breijs

    cies # showroommama ! nl

Anne-Marie Mahfouf

    annma@kde.org

Andrew Coles

    andrew_coles@yahoo.co.uk

Conversion to British English
2004 Cies Breijs
&FDLNotice;
2004-10-5
0.2.1

&kturtle; is an educational programming environment using the &logo; programming language.

KDE kdeedu KTurtle education language native programming code Logo instructions turtle

## Introduction

&kturtle; is an educational programming environment using the &logo; programming language. It tries to make programming as easy and accessible as possible. This makes &kturtle; suitable for teaching kids the basics of maths, geometry and... programming. The commands used to program are in the style of the &logo; programming language. The unique feature of &logo; is that the commands are often translated into the speaking language of the programmer.

&kturtle; is named after the turtle that plays a central role in the programming environment. The user programs the turtle, using the &logo; commands, to draw a picture on the canvas.

### What is &logo;?

The first version &logo; programming language was created by Seymour Papert of MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1967 as an offshoot of the LISP programming language. From then many versions of &logo; have been released. By 1980 &logo; was gaining momentum, with versions for MSX, Commodore, Atari, Apple II and IBM PC systems. These versions were mainly for educational purposes. LCSI released MacLogo in 1985 as a tool for professional programmers, but it never caught on. MIT is still maintaining a site on &logo; which can be found on http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/.

Today there are several versions of &logo; around which can easily be found on MIT's &logo; site and by a simple Google search. This version of &logo; (&kturtle;) is only focused on the educational qualities of the programming language and will not try to suit professional programmers' needs.

### Features of &kturtle;

&kturtle; has some nice features that make starting to program a breeze. See here some of the highlights of &kturtle; feature set:

- An integrated &logo; interpreter, so no need to download any other program.

- A powerful editor for the &logo; commands with intuitive syntax highlighting, line numbering and more.

- The canvas can be saved as an image or printed.

- Context help for all &logo; commands: Just press F1.

- The &logo; commands are fully translatable (currently only English, Dutch, French, German and Swedish are supported).

- Full-screen mode.

- Many integrated, internationalised example &logo; programs make it easy to get started.

&using-kturtle; &getting-started; &programming-reference; &glossary; &translator-guide;

## Credits and Licence

&kturtle;

Program copyright 2003-2004 Cies Breijs cies # showroommama ! nl

Contributors:

- Coding help, editor part: Anne-Marie Mahfouf annma@kde.org

- Author of wsbasic (http://wsbasic.sourceforge.net) which is the base for the interpreter of &kturtle;: Walter Schreppers Walter.Schreppers@ua.ac.be

- German Data Files: Matthias Meßmer bmlmessmer@web.de

- Swedish Data Files: Stefan Asserhäll stefan.asserhal@telia.com

Documentation copyright 2004

- Cies Briej cies # showroommama ! nl

- Anne-Marie Mahfouf annma@kde.org

- Some proofreading changes by &Philip.Rodrigues; &Philip.Rodrigues.mail;

- Updated translation how-to and some proofreading changes by Andrew Coles andrew_coles@yahoo.co.uk

Andrew Colesandrew_coles@yahoo.co.uk

&underFDL; &underGPL;

## Installation

### How to obtain &kturtle;

&install.intro.documentation;

### Compilation and Installation

&install.compile.documentation;
&documentation.index;