teaching machines

Droplets

April 11, 2019 by . Filed under public, twoville.

A year ago some students and I started designing programming languages for generating 2D vector art. I called my language Twoville, which pays homage to Seymour Papert’s metaphor of learning math in Mathland just as we learn French in France. The language is a place to learn about and forge 2D shapes. After the semester ended and the accountability dried up, I set my language aside to work on more pressing (income-generating) matters.

But the project has been gnawing on me. Every time I see an interesting graphic, I consider what features are needed for me to recreate it in Twoville. For example, during my sabbatical in Australia, I encountered this logo on Musk Avenue during my daily walks through the Queensland University of Technology:

Daily did it haunt me. But at the time, Twoville didn’t support arcs or a facility for abstracting the droplet shape. However, I’ve just added support for functions and SVG path elements, and I can finally get this logo out of my head and into Twoville:

Sweet relief.