We want to encourage people to make art with code, we also want to be able to take that art from the computer screen and make it into something tangible. There’s a magic involved in going from the screen to a physical object. Students see their designs take new forms. Laser cutters and other digital fabrication tools provide new ways for the art to escape the screen.

For the past two years we have been working on a program that translates images made in TurtleArt to svg files that can be used to print the designs made by students using tools like laser cutters and 3D printers. This allows for students to skip the steps of the digital fabrication process that require the use of Adobe Illustrator, allowing for a more streamlined process and minimizing the role of the instructor.

If you would like to see the practical applications of TurtleArt and our svg converter, feel free to follow our twitter @PicoTurtleArt. If you would like to experiment with it yourself, play around with Web Turtle Art, which includes the feature to turn all of your projects into svg format.

Playful Invention has done digital fabrication work with the Exploratorium, which you can view here and here.