Kojo explorations/Introduction
The book will help you to:
- Create beautiful computer generated art.
- Make electronic circuits to do fun things.
- Apply math to enrich your creations (drawings and circuits).
Learn computer programming (a very important 21st century skill), math, and physics, along with thinking and problem solving skills – as you go about making your creations.
You will do all of this using a learning environment called Kojo. To learn more about Kojo before you begin this journey, you are welcome to take a quick look at the "Kojo, An Introduction ebook"[1].
The following is a picture of the Kojo workspace:
When you start up Kojo, you see a turtle sitting near the center of the screen, within a window called the drawing canvas. Your programs instruct this turtle to do things. You can ask it to move forward, drawing a line as it moves. You can ask it to turn left or right. You can ask it to change the color of the lines it draws, and the shapes it fills. All of this can be used to make very interesting drawings. To the bottom-left of the Kojo workspace is the script editor, where you write your programs (or scripts, which are small programs). The script editor has a tool-bar with buttons that quickly let you do most of the core things that you need to do within Kojo – run programs, trace programs, check your programs for errors, etc. To the bottom-right is the output pane, where Kojo gives you informative messages to help you recover from mistakes that you make in your programs. You also write out results from your programs in this area. To whet your appetite, here are some examples (taken from the Kojo Samples and Showcase menus) of drawings that you can create within Kojo:
With that brief introduction to Kojo, lets get going...