I watched all the videos and tried the bumper turtles with my students. Sometimes the turtles react to the painted landmarks and turn, but sometimes they just keep moving right on through the landmarks. My students are frustrated because we can't figure out why they do this and how to fix it. I wish there were some cheat codes for teachers to get an idea of what the code should look like and some common problems that students run into and how to solve them.
https://www.slnova.org/miriam.brown/projects/658258/
Comments
Hi, and thanks for your question. We don't have a Bumper Turtles solution model in our CS in Science Module 1 StarLogo Nova gallery but I've made a possible model here you can look at: https://www.slnova.org/GUTS/projects/659360. There are two likely reasons why your turtles might appear to react to the code sometimes and not others. First, because the turtles are bigger than the patches, it may look like they are hitting the patch sometimes when the computer doesn't register that as a collision (a near miss is a miss, to the computer). Try increasing the size of the patches (in the Paint Landmarks procedure on the world page) and see if this solves the problem. If not (and the more likely problem) is that you have instructed the turtles to move forward more than 1 step at a time. If they do that, the computer will think the turtle has jumped over the patch (rather than going through it, which it looks like it does as you are watching it) and so won't react. Check that the turtles are moving only 1 step forward on each pass through the forever loop, and that may solve the problem. If neither of these works, please make sure your project is saved to a public gallery, and send me the link to it, and I will see if I can figure it out. The Module 1 slide presentation (linked on the CS in Science Module 1 resource, or use the search window to locate it) does show a partial solution on slide 41, so that may also help you. Thanks again for your question, and let us know if you need any more help.
Thank you that helped. My students had discussed all of those possibilities so I am glad that we are on target. This is my first time teaching this so I just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything wrong. Thanks again for the quick response. My students are loving this!