Recently I've gotten a lot of childlike joy out of writing simple programs to draw shapes (e.g. fractals), sending the output off to a fab shop, and getting laser-cut wood pieces of those shapes mailed back to me. There's something very, very pleasing about writing programs whose "output" is something you can hold tactile-ly in your hand. There's also something to learn in the process of optimizing a program for fabrication cost.
Project idea: Could you write a plugin or something that exports Snap! turtle paths to a laser-cuttable format (ideally SVG)? Or: has someone already(!) done this?
You can actually do this in Snap! already. All you need to do is go into settings and enable 'log pen vectors',
then when there are pen drawings on the stage, you can right click it and choose the 'svg' option to download an svg of the pen trails.
Hope this helps!
Some experiments from a couple of years ago (the SVGs were not exported from Snap!, of course… rather from a janky SML program I wrote): https://github.com/kach/jigsaw
This was a few years back, before Snap had Pen Trails objects and SVG export...or before I knew about them at least!
When we did with project with "advanced" g10 math students, it was fascinating to watch them argue about which designs were easy or hard. The nominal math focus was parameterization of polar coordinate functions, so lots of projects iterated a theta and jammed the parametrized expressions into a Go To X() Y((). But some kids started using turtle geometry to move around the space, adding recognizable LOGO shapes to these canonical drawings, moving along a turtle path without drawing but adding little polar shapes at various nodes.
Everyone was happy wit what they were drawing, but was convinced that their way was the real challenge and everyone else was taking the easy/cheat path.
