#pythonturtle

PythonTurtle makes it into Saudi Arabia’s official state curriculum

I just heard some very exciting news.

Six years ago, when I was just starting out my development career, I made a little program called PythonTurtle. It’s a program that helps children learn how to program in the Python programming language, which is the programming language that I use it my day-to-day work as a web developer. I created PythonTurtle as a side project, because I saw there wasn’t a viable solution for children to learn how to program in Python. I figured there should be a solution, so I spent roughly two months of hard work building and releasing PythonTurtle.

Screenshot from the program:

What’s special about PythonTurtle is that it lets children learn programming in an exciting way that puts emphasis on fun and creativity rather than technical details.

When using the program, an illustrated turtle is displayed on the screen, and the children can program it to move around the screen and draw lines. The more programming concepts the children learn, the more impressive drawings they can create with the program. This gives them motivation to learn and improve their skills without feeling that it’s being forced on them by their schoolteacher.

PythonTurtle is based on an educational program called LOGO that was developed in the eighties; what I made is in fact a modern version, so instead of teaching programming in a didactic language, it taught programming in the Python programming language, which is a real language used in the industry today. The idea is to bring children closer to the techniques used in the real world, and possibly plant the seeds of a career in software development.

Because I was just starting out as software developer back then, I didn’t have the skills that I have today, and developing this software was hard for me. There were technical challenges (specifically modifying the wxPython shell to be able to command an auxiliary process.) These challenges were so hard, that it looked like I wasn’t going to solve them, and at a few points I considered giving up on the project entirely. I was asking myself, why am I even doing this? No one even knew I was working on this program, and no one seemed to care.

But I told myself that I’m creating something big here, and it’s important that I see this through to the end. So I did, and I overcame the technical problems.

I released the program as open-source under the MIT license, which means that every person on Earth could download it and use it free of charge. I decided to release it that way rather than as commercial software because I figured more children could use it if it was free, and that seemed more important to me than making a few bucks. I also liked the idea of contributing back to the open-source community, because so much of the software that I use every day is built on open-source software that was made by volunteers, so I was happy to contribute my share of open-source software.

I released the software for download and I submitted a link to the website to tech forums such as HN and Reddit, and over the next few days, the story blew up, and thousands of people visited the website. I was very happy and proud that people liked my project so much.

Over the six years since I’ve released the program, I’ve gotten many happy emails from teachers and parents who used the program to teach their children to program. It’s always heartwarming to get these emails. They come from all over the world: From the States, from the UK, from Africa, Australia, South America… I would occasionally also get emails from children themselves, and one time even from a 80-year-old man who said that he used my program to learn to program himself. I got more reports of adults enjoying using the program. Looking at the analytics for the website, I saw that PythonTurtle was downloaded almost 100,000 times, which made me very proud.

But last year, I’ve noticed something odd. I was checking how the site is doing on Google Analytics and saw that I’m getting a disproportionally large number of hits from Saudi Arabia.

Specifically, there was a big peak of Saudi visitors around January 2014, and than that peak appeared again in January 2015. I also got more feedback emails from people with Arab-sounding names. I investigated why, and found a Saudi forum where PythonTurtle was mentioned. The text was in Arabic, and I tried translating it to English using Google Translate, but the result was too hard to understand, so I let it go and didn’t investigate further.

Until a couple of days ago, I got an email from a teacher from Saudi Arabia about PythonTurtle. He told me that PythonTurtle is being used in all high-schools in Saudi Arabia! The ministry of education of Saudi Arabia has put PythonTurtle into the official state curriculum! This means that it’s being used by more than 4,000 schools which teach more than 700,000 students!!!