Picture Puzzles

Picture Puzzle | Designing the Project | Programming | Assignments

Task

• to draw turtles on the page, to change their shape, to create the figures according to patterns

• how to create the turtles, to change their shape, to define their events, to create buttons to use

• how to drag the turtle in the simplest way, how to create the image for various kinds of activities, how to copy the turtles with the Clipboard, how to define empty events

You have probably seen puzzles like pentonimoes, tangrams and Chinese Egg puzzles where you have several pieces out of which you can compose images. Creating these puzzles in Imagine Logo is very easy.

Designing the project...

1. The figure to create will be displayed on the screen. This will be a bird created from the Chinese Egg puzzle.
2. On the page there will be several turtles-shapes that you will be able to drag and rotate. The player will move these pieces into the shape and solve the puzzle.

Programming

Your turtle will be the egg image, showing one of its bird shapes to copy. Click here to download the file egg.lgf.

Right click on your turtle and choose Change t1 from the menu which appears. Change your turtle into this new egg shape.

Right click on the egg shape and choose Edit Shape from the menu, which appears. The egg shape will load into Logomotion.

At the bottom of the LogoMotion screen you can see the organisation of this file: there are several frames and each of them representing the image of a different animal. Here (see right) shows an example of one of these birds. Finish Logomotion by pressing the button Save and Exit on the right hand end of the title bar.

	To set your turtle to show this frame (for example) right click on the turtle and choose Change t1. Click on the Shape tab and select Frame 2 in the dialog that appears.

Put the button on the page, change its Caption to Next Image and its event onPush to t1'setFrame frame+1. Equally as in Super Logo, this command allows for the frames to loop, so the first frame follows the last frame. Try pressing this button - the turtle will change its shape. The Puzzle Pieces - Now you are going to add all the shapes to the screen that will make up the egg puzzle. Click here to download the files (there are nine of them in a zip file).

Add a new turtle to your page, in its context menu select Change t2, move its pen up and change its shape - select the file 01.lgf. (If you click on the shape tab you can browse its image in LogoMotion again and you will see several frames - each a different rotation of the same image. You can change the rotation of your shape using a right mouse button click.

Select the Events tab, add the event onRightDown (click here is you don't remember how to add events) and type in setFrame frame+1

Finally select the Shape tab and put a tick in the Auto Drag box – this lets you drag a turtle on screen. In this dialog notice that the Manual Frame Mode item is ticked – this determines the turtle being viewed.

Finally, close the dialog Change t2 by clicking on OK.

Note: Use the command t2'changeme if you need to open the dialog box for t2.

One part is prepared for solving. The turtle can be dragged on the page and it can turn by clicking the middle mouse button on its The puzzle is now started. You can click and drag your shape to see where it fits into the final shape. You can rotate it with the right mouse button.

Now you can add the rest of the pieces for the egg puzzle. Follow the steps above to add new turtles to the screen with the shapes 02.lgf to 09.lgf.

Assignments

• Try out all the puzzles. Can you do them all? Does it help if you change the colour of the main image? Edit the main image in Logomotion to changes its colour.
• Whilst dragging the small puzzle pieces on screen you may notice that some go behind other pieces. This is because of the order in which the pieces were created. Decide the order of your puzzle pieces and use the command ? t4'toFront (for example) to sort your puzzle.

• A right click on a small turtle puzzle piece rotates that turtle. Often we miss the image and the context, menu Change Page1 appears. Turn this off by adding an Events for onRigthDown, but keep the command empty.

• Similarly, you edit the main image of the solved picture so that its context menu does not show.

• Create a new button called Home and an onPush event of ask all home, which will move all the pieces of the puzzle back to their start positions. Use the command t6'changeme (for example) to open the following dialog box where you can position the turtle exactly as you wish on screen. Click on Set Current in the Home State part of the dialog box and the turtle will adopt its current position as its home position.

Download the Project

You can download an example of the finished project by clicking here