We just drew a circle with the ellipse function, but there are so many other types of shapes we can draw.

Rectangles and Squares

Let’s make a square! Press the ‘Backspace’ key until all of your code is removed, and then type the line below:

rect(10,10,50,50);

Now press the Play button. You should see this on your screen:

This program looks a lot like our first program, but we replaced the ellipse function with the rect function. We have now told the computer we want to draw a rectangle instead of a circle.

Lines

Let’s try a different function. Replace the rect function with line.

Your program should look like this:

line(10,10,50,50);

Now press the Play button. You should see this on your screen:

Triangles

Let’s try drawing a triangle! Press the ‘Enter’ key, then type the line below:

Your program should look like this:

line(10,10,50,50);
triangle(50,50,20,90,80,90);

Now press the Play button. You should see this on your screen:

We just did a couple of interesting new things! All of the functions we have written until now have four numbers, but the triangle function has six! Some functions - like triangle - need more information than others.

The other thing we just did is we wrote a program that has two instructions. When we run the program, the computer will first create a line and then create a triangle. This is why we need to type the ; semicolon at the end of each instruction, so the computer knows when to start the next instruction. You would think it could figure this out every time you type a new line, but computers aren’t very smart.

We’ve tried a bunch of functions, but each one of them has these weird numbers like (10,10,10,10) next to it. What do those mean? Let’s look at that next.