Get Started

Kedama is made up of several parts. At the bottom is the Kedama world itself, which appears as a large black box. On top of this is an invisible grid of squares. Each of the squares is called a patch, and the entire grid is controlled by patch variables that you can program. Patches are only found in Kedama and can be thought of as parts of a piece of graph paper with 100 x 100 cells (10,000 in total). Each cell can be assigned an integer value. Moving across these patches in the Kedama world are the turtle breeds, which are groups of turtles that act in the same way. You can decide how many different breeds there are, set how many turtles are in each breed, choose the color of the breed, and write the scripts that all turtles in each breed will follow. These turtles, moving across the Kedama world, can also read the value of each patch and respond to it. Finally, there are the individual turtles, or particles, that share the name of their breed. For example, the first breed that you create will be “turtle1”, so each turtle in this breed will follow instructions to turtle1. Turtles are given instructions as a breed, not as individual turtles.

To find Kedama in Squeak:
Go to Supplies and drag out the Object Catalog. You should see a button labeled “Kedama.”

Drag the Kedama world onto the etoy world, and you’re set to go! Bring up a viewer of the Kedama world and you’ll find a new category called “kedama,” which contains commands that can be used within the system.

Those of you who are using computers with higher resolution might want to play with Kedama’s “pixelsPerPatch” command, located in the same menu. Here, you can change the number of pixels in each patch to make the turtles in the Kedama world clearer for you.