T-Th 9:05
or
T-Th 11:15
in Olin 155

CS 1110: Introduction to Computing Using Python

Fall 2015

Assignment 4:
Turtles

Due to CMS by Thursday, October 29th at 11:59 pm.

Computer graphics can be tricky, and you often need a lot of experience with programming before you can get started. However, for over forty years, the LOGO Turtle has allowed elementary-school students to draw cool and interesting shapes on their computer. And if they can do it, so can you.

The Turtle is a cursor on the screen that uses a Turtle for its icon. To draw a line, you push the Turtle forward. The screen draws a line of the same color as the Turtle (which can be changed at any time) along its path of movement. To draw more interesting shapes, you simply change the direction of the Turtle. With a few more commands you can even draw solid shapes.

While programming languages have come a long way since the early days of LOGO, the graphics Turtle lives on. Every major programming language, from C/C++ to Java to Python, has a version of the Turtle. For today's assignment you get to participate in this 40 year tradition, and hopefully have some fun in the process.

This assignment is a little harder than the previous one, but you have two full weeks to work on it. In the past we have found this to be more than enough time for this assignment. But get started early! If you do not know where to start, or if you are completely lost, please see someone immediately: either the instructor, a TA, or a consultant. A little in-person help can do wonders.

Again, please remember to fill out the survey telling us how long you worked on this assignment.

Update October 20: Several students are having trouble with the Pen class. If you are having problems, download the new version of tkturtle.py from the assignment resources below. Make sure to put this file in the same folder as your file a4.py

Learning Objectives

This assignment serves several important roles.

• It introduces you to the famous Turtle, which is a great way to learn a new language.
• It gives you experience with writing simple for-loops.
• It gives you experience with recursion.
• It gives you experience with complex objects that have both attributes and methods.
• It gives you experience with using asserts to enforce your preconditions.

Table of Contents

Authors: D. Gries, W. White, L. Lee, S. Marschner.

• Academic Integrity and Collaboration
• Turtle Graphics
• Assignment Source Code
• Window
• Turtle
• Drawing with the Turtle
• Pen
• Assignment Instructions
• Asserting Preconditions
• Task 1. Triangles
• Task 2. Hexagons
• Task 3. Radial Shapes
• Task 4. Recursive Graphics
• Finishing the Assignment

Academic Integrity and Collaboration

Academic Integrity

This is a classic assignment that is returning after a short break because students really like it. But when we say classic, we mean really, really old. While we did mix it up a bit this year, there are guaranteed to be solutions to many of these problems in the wild. Please avoid looking at solutions online, or looking code from other students this semester, or semesters previous.

In this assignment, it is highly unlikely that your code for this assignment will look exactly like someone else's. We will be using Moss to check for instances of plagiarism. If you do collaborate with another person, you should clearly state this in your module comments; otherwise, this may result in an Academic Integrity hearing. Furthermore, even if you do properly cite, we still may deduct points from your final score. Try to do this assignment on your own.

Collaboration Policy

You may do this assignment with one other person. If you are going to work together, then form your group on CMS as soon as possible. If you do this assignment with another person, you must work together. It is against the rules for one person to do some programming on this assignment without the other person sitting nearby and helping.

If you do talk about this assignment with someone outside your group, please note this in both the header docstring for a4.py, as well as the function specification for the part that you talked about. We will not hold an academic integrity hearing if you cite the collaboration. However, we may still deduct points from your grade.

Turtle Graphics

Python actually has a built-in Turtle provided by the turtle module. However, we find this module a bit confusing to use, particularly for a beginner. Instead, we provide an alternative Turtle, which we call the Tk Turtle. This Turtle is in the module tkturtle which was installed as part of Cornell Extensions. You will be using this module together with some additional files.

Assignment Source Code

At first glance, this assignment is much more bare-bones than previous ones. There is only one file to download:

a4.py

This is file contains stubs for all the functions in this assignment, and is the file you will submit for a grade.

tkturtle.py

This is an alternate version of tkturtle for students having problems with the one installed by CornellExtensions. Put it in the same folder as a4.py.

To save you time, we have given complete specifications of most of the functions you are to write. Study them carefully. Note how precise and thorough they are. You should aim for this level of quality when you start to write your own specifications.

You will not be creating a test script this time. Writing test cases for graphics is almost impossible. Therefore, you will be looking at the the drawings produced by your functions to determine correctness.

However you will notice that you can actually run a4.py as a script. Run it as a script by typing

  python a4.py

You will see that it asks you yes/no questions. Answer 'y' to this first question. The turtle will draw two lines for you. In general, answering 'y' will call the specific drawing function so that you can test it. Any other answer will skip over that drawing function. Since drawing can take a long time, this allows you a nice way to test only the specific drawing function that you are working on. However, right now it does not do much. That is because you have not started on the assignment.

If you want more control over your testing, you will need to import the functions of a4.p manually. To do this, you need to understand the tkturtle module a bit more. This module provides three classes: Window, Turtle, and Pen.

Window

To create a window, you use the constructor Window() and assign the result to a variable. Try this command at the interactive prompt:

>>> import tkturtle
>>> w = tkturtle.Window()

This will display a window on your screen. The window object has several attributes that you can change.

Try changing the values of these attributes (with assignment statements). For example, what happens when you type the following command:

>>> w.width = 100

In addition, there are two important methods:

w.clear()

This erases the contents of the Window. It also detaches any Turtles so that they no longer work.

w.bye()

This closes the Window permanently.

Turtle

The Turtle class is used to draw on your Window. Each Turtle object t has the following important attributes:

To create a Turtle, you use the constructor Turtle() which takes a single argument: the Window that you want to draw on. Assuming that you made a Window object w in the previous section, try the following at the interactive prompt:

>>> t = tkturtle.Turtle(w)

The fact that Turtle and Window are separate allows you to have as many Turtles as you like so that you can draw different things with them. If at any time you have too many Turtles, use the method w.clear(). This removes all Turtles from the Window (which means that attempts to do anything with any old Turtles will fail), so you will need to add a brand new Turtle to start drawing again.

Position and Orientation

The position and heading of the Turtle are maintained using floating point numbers. This is needed for accuracy. If integers were used, errors would be introduced after only a few calculations. However, whenever a point is to be drawn in the window, its x- and y-coordinates are rounded to the nearest integer because the pixel coordinates are represented as integers.

The direction of the Turtle is called its heading. It is a number representing the angle in degrees counterclockwise from east (to the right). Thus east is 0 degrees, north is 90 degrees, west is 180 degrees, and south is 270 degrees. Negative angles and angles greater than 360 are allowed; the remainder modulo 360 is used.

While the heading attribute can be modified, the x and y attributes cannot. You can only control the Turtle's position via the methods listed below.

Important Methods

In addition to its attributes, a Turtle object t has several important methods:

t.forward(dist)

Moves the Turtle dist pixels in the direction of its current heading. If the drawmode is True, a line is drawn; otherwise, no line is drawn.

t.backward(dist)

Moves the Turtle dist pixels in the opposite direction of its current heading. If the drawmode is True, a line is drawn; otherwise, no line is drawn.

t.left(a)

Rotates the Turtle in place a degrees counterclockwise.

t.right(a)

Rotates the Turtle in place a degrees clockwise.

t.move(x,y)

Moves the Turtle t to pixel (x,y) without drawing anything.

Note that most of these methods are used to move the Turtle about the screen. This is why the attributes x and y cannot be altered directly (e.g. you cannot assign values to them). You should use these methods instead.

Colors

To change the Turtle color, you assign a new value to the color attribute. You can use the RGB and HSV objects from the last assignment. You will need to import the colormodel module to do this. You cannot use a CMYK object with a Turtle; that color model is designed for printing, and not for displaying on your screen.

The Turtle also supports strings as colors. Just put the name of the color that you want in quotes; make sure the name is all lower case. For example, to make your Turtle blue, try

>>> t.color = 'blue'

Speed

As you will discover with this assignment, the turtle can be quite slow. You can control the speed of the Turtle by setting is speed attribute. It is a number in the range 1 ≤ speed ≤ 10, with 1 slowest and 10 fastest. You can also set the speed to 0, which causes shapes to be drawn with no animation. However, even when the speed is set to 0, you will see the the Turtle draw each line individually, so sometimes shapes can take a while to draw (this is an unfortunate issue with the way the Turtle is implemented in Python).

Drawing with the Turtle

Throughout this assignment, you will be asked to draw shapes with a Turtle. There are three ways to do this. The first is to type Turtle commands directly in the Python interactive shell. You should do this right now to familiarize yourself with the Turtle class and its methods. For example, try these commands:

>>> import tkturtle
>>> w = tkturtle.Window()
>>> t = tkturtle.Turtle(w)
>>> t.color = 'green'
>>> t.forward(100)
>>> t.color = 'red'
>>> t.right(90)
>>> t.forward(150)

As you type the lines up to and including t = tkturtle.Turtle(w), you will see a window appear with a Turtle at the center facing west. As you type the other commands, the Turtle will change color, move, and draw lines.

The second way to draw is to add new procedures to the module a4.py and call them from the interactive prompt. If you look at the file, you will notice that it contains a procedure draw_two_lines. We gave you this procedure to show you how to write a graphics procedure. Note that it takes the Window object as an argument, so it does not create a new window. It also does not clear the Window, though we might want our other functions to do that. All it does is create a Turtle, and use that Turtle to draw two lines.

To try out this function, navigate to the directory containing the file a4.py and start up the interactive prompt. Then type:

>>> import tkturtle
>>> w = tkturtle.Window()
>>> import a4
>>> a4.draw_two_lines(w,2)

This will draw two lines in the window w, at speed 2. Study the body of draw_two_lines, as it will help you with all of the tasks in this assignment.

For the remainder of this assignment, you will be writing procedures that draw shapes, much like draw_two_lines. As you write a procedure, refer constantly to the specification. Follow it carefully. If you have to call another procedure, look at its specification and make sure you follow it. A huge number of programming errors arise from not following specifications carefully.

Pen

>>> import tkturtle
>>> w = tkturtle.Window()
>>> p = tkturtle.Pen(w)

You should now see a pencil icon on your Window. If you do not, please post on Piazza, as that is a sign of a bigger problem.

A Pen object has a lot of attributes in common with Turtle. However, it does not have a heading attribute. Instead, for a Pen object p, you draw with the following methods.

p.drawLine(dx,dy)

Draws a line starting from the current Pen position with distance dx pixels along the x-axis and dy pixels along the y-axis.

p.drawCircle(r)

Draws a circle of radius r (in pixels) centered at the current Pen position.

p.move(x,y)

Moves the Pen p to pixel (x,y) without drawing anything.

Solid Shapes

The Pen also does not have a drawmode attribute. The three methods listed above either always draw (drawLine, drawCircle) or never draw (move). Instead, the Pen has a fill attribute. When this attribute is True, the Pen will enter into a "fill mode". Anything that is drawn between now and when the attribute becomes False (or when a call to move is made) will result in a solid shape.

For example, to draw a solid square, try the following sequence of commands with your Pen.

>>> p.fillcolor = 'blue'
>>> p.fill = True
>>> p.drawLine(0,50)
>>> p.drawLine(50,0)
>>> p.drawLine(0,-50)
>>> p.drawLine(-50,0)
>>> p.fill = False

When you finish, the pen will fill the insides of the square with the color blue.

Because the pen can draw solid shapes, it actually has two color attributes: fillcolor and pencolor (there is no simple color attribute in Pen). The fillcolor is the color it uses inside a solid shape, and pencolor is the color for hollow shapes as well as the border of solid shapes.

Assignment Instructions

This assignment is broken up into four tasks. Each task corresponds to a procedure stub (or collection of stubs) in a4.py. You will find this assignment to be a lot easier if you complete and fully test one task before moving on to the next.

We do not require that you make a test module this time. We have provided the test procedure main() which calls the various drawing functions. It is the procedure called when you run the module as a script. Feel free to make any changes that you wish to this function. We will not look a the body of this function when we grade your assignment.

Asserting Preconditions

As we saw in class, it is very helpful to assert your preconditions when you are using recursion or iteration. This keeps you from being caught in an (effectively) infinite loop.

Through out the code in a4.py, we have placed assert statements in the various function stubs. However, we do not guarantee that they are enough. When you complete a function, we expect that you fully check your precondition with assert statements. If the provided assert statements do not fully check your precondition, then you must add more.

To help you with this process, we have provided you with several helper functions at the very top of a4.py. All of these helper functions return a boolean value: True or False. These helper functions are to be used inside of an assert to check part of a precondition, as shown throughout the code.

As we saw in class, it is quite common to use helper functions to check preconditions. Some of the preconditions in this assignment can be quite complex. In particular, look at the function for is_valid_color(). This allows us to simplify our assert statements a lot.

You will also notice that we have a helper function called report_error. In the past, we discovered that students are quite prone to make coding mistakes in their assert error messages (particularly adding a non-string to a string). This function is a nice way to make error messages that is fairly foolproof.

Task 1. Triangles

Complete the procedure draw_triangle(t,s,c). This procedure is given a Turtle as a parameter. You do not need to make a new Turtle, nor a new Window.

This procedure should draw an equilateral triangle of side length s and color c using Turtle t. It should draw the triangle using t's current position and orientation. The Turtle should end its drawing at the same position and orientation as when it started. Do not save the Turtle's position and orientation at the beginning and then restore them at the end. If you draw the triangle correctly, following the instructions in the procedure specification, then this should happen automatically.

To try out the procedure, type the following in interactive mode.

       
>>> import tkturtle
>>> import a4
>>> w = tkturtle.Window()
>>> t = tkturtle.Turtle(w)
>>> a4.draw_triangle(t,200,'green')

Task 2. Hexagons

Complete the procedure draw_hex(t,s). This method should draw six equilateral triangles using color 'orange' with side lengths s. This triangles should form a hexagon, as illustrated to the right. Follow the specification and hints carefully. In particular, be sure to use the helper function suggested. Do not try to repeat code already written.

For both draw_triangle and draw_hex, it is very important that you follow the specifications. If you do not follow the specifications exactly, we will deduct points. In particular, pay close attention what we say about the state of the Turtle. Did you make any changes to Turtle attributes that need to be changed back to what they were orginally?

Task 3. Radial Shapes

Choose two (and only two!) from the following three activities: spirals, polygons, or radiating lines. Once you have done two of these, you are free (but not required) to do the remaining one. These are pretty fun assignments. If you decide to do all three, we will grade you on the best two (though there is no extra credit beyond that).

Each of these tasks involves creating a helper procedure. In each case, the main procedure does not have a Turtle as parameter, but its helper procedure does. The main procedure clears the Window, creates a Turtle, calls the helper procedure to do the work, then hides the Turtle. Note that some of these procedures are very particular about which way that the newly created Turtle should start out facing. Remember that you can control the facing of your Turtle via the heading attribute.

When writing these procedures, write the main procedure first, then the helper, and finally test both by calling the first one in python. If the main procedure is foo, its associated helper is called foo_helper. We have created stubs for all of these procedures in a4.py. Do not change the headers (either the names or the parameters), as our grading software will be calling them by those names. Just fill in the bodies.

Once again, it is very important that you follow the specifications for all three procedures below. If you do not follow the specifications exactly, we will deduct points. Pay close attention what we say about the state of the Turtle. Did you make any changes to Turtle attributes that need to be changed back to what they were orginally?

Spirals

The first picture to the right is done by drawing 10 lines. The lines have length 10, 20, 30, ... . After each line, the Turtle turns left 90 degrees. The second diagram to the right shows a similar spiral but with the Turtle turning left 75 degrees after each line.

Complete the procedures draw_spiral and draw_spiral_helper. Pay close attention to how the lines grow at each step. Also pay close attention to how these change color. These are all import parts of the specification.

When you first test these function, use 10 for the initial side length. Try different angles, like 90 degrees, 92 degrees, 88 degrees, and so on. You will be amazed at what these procedures do. Find out by trying these calls (after creating the Window w):

  draw_spiral(w,  8,  90, 300, 10)
  draw_spiral(w,  8, 135, 400, 10)
  draw_spiral(w,  9,  60, 100, 10)
  draw_spiral(w,  9, 121, 500, 10)
  draw_spiral(w, 10,  89, 400, 10)
  draw_spiral(w, 10, 150, 300, 10)
  draw_spiral(w, 10,-144, 500, 10)

Polygons

The first image to the right is a 10-sided polygon. The second image to the right is a series of 100 10-sided polygons, the first started at angle 90, the second at an angle of 90 + 360.0/100, the third at an angle of 90 + 2*360.0/100, and so on. This demonstrates the kind of cool pictures you can draw just with polygons.

Complete the procedures multi_polygons and multi_polygons_helper so that your program can draw such designs. You should use the procedure draw_polygon, which we have provided, as a helper function (do not modify this procedure).

You should also pay attention to the color alternation. As you can see in the 100 polygon picture, we alternate the color red and green. When your are finished, experiment to see what neat designs come out. For example, try the following (after creating the Window w):

  multi_polygons(w, 45,  3, 100, 10)
  multi_polygons(w, 60, 30,  20, 10)

Radiating Lines

The picture on the left consists of 16 lines of the same length radiating out from the initial Turtle position. The angle between the lines is the same. The second picture has 300 lines. If n lines are drawn, the angle between them is 360.0/n. Furthermore, the color of each line depends on the angle (i.e. the direction) of each line.

Note that the Turtle color attribute will accept HSV objects. A line drawn at angle ang uses the color HSV(ang, 1.0, 1.0). Just assign the object to the attribute and start drawing. This should make this part of the assignment fairly straightforward. Remember the invariants for an HSV object when you are drawing.

Complete the procedures radiate and radiate_helper. When finished, test them with small values of n, like 4 or 8. After the procedures are completely tested, try them with 360 lines of length 200. Also, try 2000 lines and Turtle speed 0 (which still takes a while because of how the Turtle draws), and notice how much more filled in the disk becomes.

Task 4. Recursive Graphics

In this next task you will draw several fractals. A fractal is a shape that has parts which (when you zoom in) look like the whole shape. This suggests that you will need to use recursion to draw them. The number of recursive steps (or depth) determines the resolution of the fractal drawn. Wikipedia has a wealth of information about these and other fractals.

As in the previous task, you are choose two from the following three activities: the Cantor stool, the T-Square, and the Sierpinski snowflake. Once you must complete two of these, and are free (but not required) to do the remaining one. Again, if you do all three, we will grade the best two.

Throughout all three of these tasks, we ask that you use a Pen instead of a Turtle because (1) there is no need to maintain the direction and (2) Pen methods can draw solid shapes. See the overview of the Pen above for more information.

As with the radial shapes, for each of these recursive tasks, you will implement two procedures, a main procedure and a helper. The main procedure clears the Window and creates a new Pen. It also calls the helper to do the drawing, then cleans up afterward. The main procedure does not have a Pen as a parameter (though it does have the Window as a parameter), while the helper does.

The helper is the function that does all the real drawing. It is the function that is supposed to call itself recursively. The main procedure is not recursive.

Once again, it is very important that you follow the specifications for all three procedures below. If you do not follow the specifications exactly, we will deduct points. Pay attention to when the Pen should and should not be visible.

Cantor Stools

The Cantor stool is a 2-dimensional version of the Cantor set. The legs of the stool are formed by the recursive calls beyond the base case. Below are the Cantor stools for depths 0, 1, 2, and 3 respectively. The width of each stool stool is size and the height of the stool is hght. In depth 0, there is no recursive call and so the stool is a simple rectangle. In depth 1, there is a single recursive call, and the stool was cut in half vertically. The horizontally, the legs take up the first and last third of the width. In depth 2, the legs of the stool are themselves stools.

Depth 0	Depth 1	Depth 2	Depth 3

In general, we construct a Cantor stool as shown below. In the base case, we draw a simple rectangle. For later depths, divide the rectangle in half vertically, drawing a rectangle with width size and height hght/2. For the legs, draw stools of one less depth whose width is size/3. You will need to reposition the stools so that they line up with the edges of the top rectangle.

We have stubbed in the procedures cantor and cantor_helper for you to complete. We have provided a procedure fill_rectangle, which you can use to draw a solid triangle. You should not modify fill_rectangle (even though it is missing asserts).

T-Squares

The T-Square is an interesting shape because it is a smaller square that is growing into a bigger square. Each additional depth fills in more of the bigger square. If you were to continue your recursive calls infinitely, it would just look like a solid (bigger) square.

Below are the T-squares for depths 0, 1, 2, and 3 respectively. In depth 0, there is no recursive call and so it is just a square of width and height side. In depth 1, there is a single recursive call and so we center smaller squares (of width side/2) on the corners of the original square. In depth 2, the corners are themselves T-squares.

Depth 0	Depth 1	Depth 2	Depth 3

In general, we construct a T-Square as shown below. In the base case, we draw a simple square. For later depths, we draw four T-Squares of half the size on each corner. You will need to reposition the T-Square so that they centered properly.

We have stubbed in the procedures tsquare and tsquare_helper for you to complete. As with the Cantor stool shape, you will want to use fill_rectangle as a helper.

Sierpinski Snowflakes

There are a lot of fractals named after Sierpinski. Some of you may have seen examples of this in your Calculus class, like the Sierpinski Carpet or Sierpinski Triangle. In these fractals you start with a basic shape (a rectangle or triangle) and recursively punch holes in the middle. The Sierpinski snowflake is similar except that it works with hexagons.

Below are the snowflakes for depths 0, 1, 2, and 3 respectively. In depth 0, there is no recursive call and so it is just a hexagon whose sides are length s (we use the parameter side in the module a4.py). In depth 1, there is a single recursive call and so break up that hexagon into six smaller hexagons and remove the middle one. At depth 2, we break up the remaining hexagons, and so on.

Depth 0	Depth 1	Depth 2	Depth 3

We have stubbed in the procedures sierpinski and sierpinski_helper for you to complete. We have provided a procedure fill_hex, which you can use to draw a solid hexagon. You should not modify fill_hex (even though it is missing asserts).

This fractal is a little trickier to understand. What does it mean to break up a hexagon into smaller hexagons? Look at the picture below. The dotted blue border is an outer blue hexagon. The green hexagons are all inside of it, and all have side length s/3. The center hexagon shares the same center as the outer hexagon. The centers of the other hexagons are all distance 2*s/3 away from it. Looking at this picture, you should be able to compute the centers of the six hexagons, which is all you need to call fill_hex

When defining your snowflake, do not "remove" the center hexagon (e.g. draw a white hexagon to erase it). Instead, you should just refuse to draw it. Except in the base case, only draw in the outer six hexagons. Those hexagons should be Sierpinski snowflakes of one less depth.

As a word of warning, a depth-3 Sierpinski snowflake appears to take up to 30 seconds to draw, even with animation speed set to the fastest possible. This is an unfortunate issue with the way Turtles and Pens work in Python, and we are still working on a solution to this problem.

Finishing the Assignment

Before you submit this assignment, you should be sure that everything is working and polished. Unlike the first assignment, you only get one submission for this assignment. If you make a mistake, you will not get an opportunity to correct it. With that said, you may submit multiple times before the due date. We will grade the most recent version submitted.

Once you have everything working you should go back and make sure that your program meets the class coding conventions. In particular, you should check that the following are all true:

1. There are no tabs in the file, only spaces (this is not an issue if you used Komodo Edit).
2. Functions are each separated by two blank lines.
3. Lines are short enough (80 chars) that horizontal scrolling is not necessary.
4. The specifications for all of the functions are complete and are docstrings.
5. Specifications are immediately after the function header and indented.

At the top of a4.py you should have three single line comments with (1) the module name, (2) your name(s) and netid(s), and (3) the date you finished the assignment. Upload this file to CMS by the due date: Thursday, October 29th at 11:59 pm. Do not submit any files with the extension/suffix .pyc. It will help to set the preferences in your operating system so that extensions always appear.

Survey

In addition to turning in the assignment, we ask that you complete the survey posted in CMS. Once again, the surveys will ask about things such as how long you spent on the assignment, your impression of the difficulty, and what could be done to improve it. Please try to complete the survey within a day of turning in this assignment. Remember that participation in surveys comprise 1% of your final grade.