This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
Snap blocks into a program, press play, and a tortoise draws your picture line by line — while the pane beside it shows the same program as real, syntax-colored Swift. Blocks you name can call themselves, so nine of them draw a tree. iPad, Mac, Vision Pro.
In 1994, in my second year of junior high school in Japan, a computer class
sat me in front of a Fujitsu FM R-50 running LogoWriter 2. There was a turtle
on the screen, and it left a line behind it wherever it walked. I got carried
away, my classmates crowded around the machine, and that was the first time I
ever succeeded at programming. It's the reason I write software for a living.
Seymour Papert, who designed Logo in 1967, died on 31 July 2016. That week I
started building a turtle graphics engine in Swift, so a kid could have on an
iPad what I'd had on that FM R-50.
Here's the part I actually care about. A boarding school in Ontario wrote to
say they were teaching with that engine, and their course ran in a particular
order: blocks first, then text, then each student plotted a shape of their own
on a pen plotter. That order is the design of this app. A child snaps blocks
together, and the pane right next to them shows the very same program as real,
syntax-colored Swift, ready to copy out. Blocks and code aren't two things here
— they're one program in two notations. The app is built for the day a child
outgrows it.
The rest: repeat, if, and boxes; dice in any number *or color* slot, so the
same program draws a different picture every run; and blocks you name yourself
— which can call themselves, so nine blocks on one screen draw a fractal tree.
Playback highlights the block being drawn, so it's never a mystery which block
made which line. Drawings are ordinary documents that show their own picture as
their icon; export SVG or PNG. iPad and Mac to build, Vision Pro to put the
finished drawing on your table.
No accounts, no ads, no analytics — there is no networking code anywhere in the
app at all. Free, and MIT on GitHub.
I'd love to hear what your kids draw with it.
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About Tortoise Blocks on Product Hunt
“Block coding for kids that grows up into Swift ”
Tortoise Blocks was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 2 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #119 on the daily leaderboard. Snap blocks into a program, press play, and a tortoise draws your picture line by line — while the pane beside it shows the same program as real, syntax-colored Swift. Blocks you name can call themselves, so nine of them draw a tree. iPad, Mac, Vision Pro.
Tortoise Blocks was featured in Open Source (68.9k followers), Kids (4.1k followers), Education (79.2k followers) and GitHub (41.4k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 82.9k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Tortoise Blocks?
Tortoise Blocks was hunted by Tomoki Kobayashi. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Tortoise Blocks stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Tomoki Kobayashi