About Turtletoy

Turtletoy allows you to create hand-coded art using a minimalistic JavaScript Turtle graphics API. You can only create black-and-white line drawings on a square canvas. By offering a very restrictive environment, we not only hope to stimulate creativity but we also make sure that the turtles can be plotted using a pen plotter.

You can read the Turtle API reference first or directly start writing your own turtle here.

Plotting your turtles

Turtletoy generates single-line art that works well with pen plotters like AxiDraw, iDraw, or Line-us. The optimized SVG export minimizes pen travel, and the G-code export lets you drive plotters and laser cutters directly.

Many of our users also cut their designs on machines like Cricut or use software like Inkscape to prepare files for their hardware.

For educators

Turtletoy is inspired by the turtle graphics API of Logo, a programming language created in the 1960s specifically to teach children computational thinking. The "turtle" concept makes abstract programming concepts visible and tangible.

Turtletoy works well as a teaching tool for geometry, logic, and programming. It runs entirely in the browser, requires no installation or login, and provides immediate visual feedback—making it suitable for classrooms and Chromebooks.

I'm interested in making Turtletoy more useful for education. If you're a teacher using Turtletoy in the classroom, I'd love to hear from you. Please get in touch with any feedback or requests.

A note on AI and creative coding

Turtletoy is a creative coding platform where the joy lies in crafting turtles yourself. While it is perfectly fine to ask an AI for help understanding a concept or debugging an issue, please do not use AI to generate entire turtles and publish them as your own work.

This undermines what makes this community valuable: the ability to learn from each other's hand-crafted techniques. When you browse turtles here, you should be able to trust that you are seeing genuine human creativity and problem-solving. Code worth studying and learning from.

Turtles that appear to be AI-generated may be set to Unlisted.

Software requirements

To run Turtletoy it is recommended that you use the latest version of one of the following browsers:

• Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome
• Microsoft Edge: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/microsoft-edge
• Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org
• Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari

Support

You can support the development of Turtletoy by giving feedback on how to improve this website. Feel free to report bugs, suggest improvements or request new features.
If you want, you can also buy me a coffee. Donations are highly appreciated and will be used to cover hosting costs and to buy (more) coffee.

Credits

Turtletoy is created by Reinder Nijhoff (@reindernijhoff.net).

A very special thanks to Íñigo Quílez and Pol Jeremias for creating Shadertoy, the inspiration behind Turtletoy.

GCODE export is based on turtletoy2gcode by analogic.