Week 3 Studio: Country Flag Studio
Git Repository: https://classroom50.org/lis875/lis-875-f26/assignments/country-flag/accept
Today we are going to practice Vexillography – the art of designing flags!
Imagine that you and your teammates are going to go and start your own country. This isn’t so crazy at it sounds; not too long ago, a family colonized an old weapons platform outside England and created the Principality of Sealand; others have claimed islands in the Pacific Ocean or tried to create floating countries that move around the ocean.
What all countries need is a flag. Your job today is to design a flag for your country, and then write a python program that draws that flag on the screen using the turtle package.
That’s it. That’s the whole of the instructions – form a group, design a flag, and program the computer to draw that flag on the screen. What the flag looks like or symbolizes is entirely up to you. How you program it is entirely up to you. How complicated or simple the flag is is up to you. Have fun with it. Be creative.
What follows is just advice for doing it. You don’t have to follow my advice. Do whatever you want. This is just my experience in doing this, and you might want to do it differently.
Advice
Flag Symbolism
Flags are not easy to design. Flags have a lot of symbolism in them. Figure out what you want your flag to symbolize, and try to make sure that the flag conveys the symbols you want it to convey.
Flag Design
The flag should follow good flag design. Here is a pamphlet from the North American Vexillography Association that describes their 5 principles for good flag design, with examples.
Start Simple
Start simple. First, design a really simple flag (a 2 or three color striped flag like the Flag of Italy?) and write a program to draw that. Then think about how you can make the flag more complicated or more interesting. Change the colors. Change the orientation. Change the size of the flag.
Think like a Pen
Turtle graphics are designed to be like drawing with a pen. Draw a line here, lift the pen, move it over here, put it back down, and draw another line. If you get stuck thinking about your program, figure out how you would draw the same thing with a pen. Break down the pen drawing into steps; those steps are the steps for the turtle.
Start on Paper
Start by drawing your flag on a piece of paper. Get something working. Then try to figure out what pen movements you had to make on paper to draw that flag, Then see if you can make the turtle move like the pen did.
Turtle Graphics
If there is something you would do with a pen, you can probably do it with a turtle. There are a lot more turtle commands than what we used in the readings or in the lab. Look at the official turtle documentation to find more commands to help you think about how to draw things.
Push yourself to try new things and new features with the Turtle graphics. It doesn’t hurt to try. If you aren’t sure, try and see what happens. For example, in one single program you can have two different turtles drawing different things at the same time! You can also have two difference screens being drawn on.
Use What You Know
You know a lot about programming already – if statements and for loops and getting input from users. Use all of that knowledge to help you in you drawing.
Stay Organized, and use comments
One of the hardest parts of programmming computers to draw on the screen is the sheer number of commands and instructions it takes. You will find that your programs are getting long quickly because it takes a lot of instructions to draw anything.
Think about how to stay organized. You can always add blank lines; use that to group sets of commmands. So if you’ve got one set of commands that draws a blue square, and another that draws a white star, leave a blank line in between them. Also, use comments (lines that start with # that don’t get read by python) to tell yourself what those lines do, logically. Its hard to understand what fd(10); right(120); fd(10); right(120); fd(10) does. It is much easier if you label this with # Draw a triangle:
# Draw a Triangle
fd(10)
right(120)
fd(10)
right(120)
fd(10)
Keep Pushing Yourself
Your flag is a computer program. That means that it can do things that other flags cannot. Think about how you might make your flag more interesting because it is a program. For example, could you animate something on the flag, or have a special way of drawing the flag? Keep pushing yourself to make the flag more interesting. Maybe you can ask the user for some input, and then customize the flag around that input? What can you do to make this flag program more interesting?