Computer Science Canada

Turing Users: Remember ShapeScape?

Author:  scholarlytutor [ Sun Mar 10, 2019 2:02 am ]
Post subject:  Turing Users: Remember ShapeScape?

Is there anyone who learned Turing in high school who still remembers ShapeScape?

It was a program made by Holt Software in 1992. My grade 10 computer science class was forced to use it for a couple of weeks before learning Turing. I had already learned some Turing from my brother, so I found ShapeScape to be annoying. It was a graphics only program which divided the screen into a simple 6 x 4 grid, supposedly making it easier to learn about graphics in computer science.

Having found the program again recently on my old Windows 3.1 PC, I have a better understanding of how it works now: It is basically Turing, but it does not allow you to do anything with text. Otherwise, besides the grid, it just adds procedures such as drawblock, drawball, drawtriangle, etc with simpler inputs (for drawblock, you only enter the coordinates for the bottom left, followed by a size, typed as a word (tiny, small, medium, etc), rather than typing coordinates for both the bottom left and top right, which is done in drawbox in Turing).

Anyway, if there's an interest in ShapeScape then I will post it to the forum, along with some instructions to get people started with it. It was made for DOS, so you'd need to run it in DosBox or FreeDos. I also have copies of older versions of Turing for Dos from the early-mid 1990s, but the files are mixed in with other junk and I am trying to sort out which files belong to the program.


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