© 2000 – 2025 Gary S. Stager
About the Project
The indigenous people of Australia, the original land owners, have expressed themselves through a form of geometric painting for thousands of years. These paintings tell the stories of dreamtime, myths of spirituality, community, and survival. The geometry and symbolism of dreamtime painting create an excellent opportunity for combining art, mathematics, language arts, multiculturalism, and social studies in a creative context. The simple geometric symbols found in this art tell stories of hunting, dreaming, and community. The procedureality of Logo is particularly well suited to these sorts of projects.
Lynx (software) offers a terrific canvas for expressing the dreamtime designs of you and your students . Lynx is a modern web-based version of the Logo programming language. Go to Lynxcoding.club to use Lynx or learn more. Turtle Art is an online, block-based, turtle geometry microworld in which formal mathematical and computational ideas are turned into beautiful images in a fashion immediately accessible to learners of all ages.
The Art
Take a look at the following websites to learn more about aboriginal art. Perhaps you will be inspired to create your own masterpiece!
The Toolkit
The procedureality of Lynx allows users to create tools for creating their art. You might think of these procedures as a collection of different paintbrushes. Each procedure creates a different type of geometric figure. The use of numerical variables/inputs allows the user to paint with number.
Dot Procedures
to dot
pd fd 0 pu
end
to dot
setsh "theshapenameofyourchoice
pd stamp pu
end
to dot
setpensize 2
pd fd 0 pu
end
Line Procedure
to l :length :spacing
repeat :length / :spacing [dot pu fd :spacing]
end
Circle Procedure
to c :radius :spacing
repeat 360 / :spacing [fd :radius dot pu bk :radius rt :spacing]
end
Concentric Circles Example
to circles
setc "red
c 100 10
setc "blue
c 50 20
setc "green
c 25 5
end
What happens when you create concentric circles with different spacing between the dots?
The Challenge
Seek inspiration from the galleries of aboriginal art listed above. Can you recreate some of the patterns you see with Lynx? Use the provided procedures and your own variations to create a dreamtime design that tells a story. Share that graphic story with your colleagues.
Right-Click (Windows) or CTRL-Click (Mac) to copy or save the graphic you create. Be sure to hide the turtle before doing so. Now, you can use your dreamtime design in other applications or print it. Are there other types of art made of dots? Can you point to some examples on the web?
Creating such designs in Turtle Art
Although Turtle Art does not feature turtle costumes to be stamped, its ease-of-use and powerful turtle geometry features make it an excellent choice for creating the sort of geometric art found in a wide variety of cultures.
I imagine that you can quickly figure out how to use Turtle Art in such a project. Here are some quick “scribblings” suggesting some possibilities.
