[Edu-sig] sa: 8144: Day Two

[kirby urner]

[

Pursuant to:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2007/07/sa-8144-day-one.html

]

I thought I'd do this one in a more premeditated style, outlining my
lesson plan for the day, then following up later with a brief report
on how I'd deviated from the script, how it all went.  That won't be
right after class, as I need to report for duty at another job in the
early PM, where I've been nominated within a new grant proposal
that just *might* involve MySQL and Python.  We'll know more in
November.

Aside (recalling EuroPython 2007):

I learned a lot about Pylons from that guy from the Ukraine (the
one who uses Mako, hosts a blog site).  Now they're saying
TurboGears is moving to it, along with SQLAlchemy out the
back end (lots of peak interest in the session on Canonical's
Storm, just why SQLAlchemy wasn't "mature enough" for
Canonical -- I protest "innocent bystander" on that one, not
having used either yet (the MySQL keynoter seemed somewhat
amused we're so in to our object-relational mappers these days)).

My aim is to dive into Python as a language, less context and
history, by means of 2-level scaffolding:  stickworks.py, introduced
in the Showmedo series, and polyhedra.py on top of that.  Both
get imported to menu-driven demo mods, so you *could* say
3-level, but I'm going to start in the IDLE shell importing stuff
just from the first two levels (giving you a capable Vector and
Edge, plus some canned data organizing these into familiar
enough wireframes (we already talked Icosahedra on the first day)).

Get used to low level vector arithmetic & graphics against an XYZ
backdrop, in the opening hours.  Pythonic Math features a one
pass approach, straight to vectors per

http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/numeracy1.html

By the time we get to viztoyz, povtoyz and x3dtoyz, they'll already
be fluent readers of basic Python grammar, complete with classes,
functions & generators, and data structures.

And this is only Day Two.

But these aren't your usual students:  a self selecting bunch
willing to do something hard in the summer, in a college context,
with some Silicon Forest weirdo named Kirby Urner, just back
from Vilnius ("where's that again?").

Kirby

PS:  up early, with a living room full of kids sleeping, so off to the local
breakfast nook, but it's closed, because we only *pretend* to be working
class in this neighborhood (Richmonders might straggle in from b'fast
around 7 AM earliest -- about now in fact, so time to return).