Living Museum of Learning
Three Ways to Draw a Soccer Field
As the 2026 World Cup approached its final match, my students were busy building 3D soccer games in p5.js.
This week, three of them shared their latest progress.
At first glance, they all seemed to be drawing the same thing.
A soccer field.
But looking more closely, I realized they were solving entirely different problems.
Nicole began with the official dimensions of a real soccer field.
Every measurement came from the laws of the game.
The center circle.
The penalty area.
The goal area.
The corner arcs.
Even the goalposts.
Her project started with the question:
"How do I faithfully model the real world?"
Ethan chose a completely different path.
Instead of drawing the entire field, he decided he only needed half of it.
The first thing he defined was not the field itself, but a reference point:
refX
refY
refZ
Once his coordinate system was established, everything else became relative to it.
His question was different:
"How should I organize my world?"
Albert surprised me again.
Rather than starting from scratch, he copied the foundation of an earlier project that drew a tetrahedron.
Then he gradually transformed it into a soccer field.
One mysterious comment remained:
"What is the triangle for? 👀"
The answer was simple.
The triangle belonged to the project's previous life.
His question was different again:
"What can I reuse?"
Three students.
One assignment.
Three ways of thinking.
Nicole was modeling reality.
Ethan was designing a coordinate system.
Albert was evolving an existing codebase.
None of them were simply "writing code."
They were making design decisions.
That is one of the most beautiful moments in teaching programming.
Eventually, students stop asking,
"How do I write this?"
Instead, they begin asking,
"How should I think about this?"
People often imagine programming as learning a language.
In reality, programming is learning how to think.
The code may look different.
The coordinate systems may differ.
The projects may evolve from different starting points.
Yet each programmer is quietly building something much more important than software.
A way of seeing the world.
