Mailman 3 October 2003 - Edu-sig

Edu Track check-in
by Jeffrey Elkner 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

Hi All, I've put up a Zwiki at: http://linus.yorktown.arlington.k12.va.us/PyCon2004/EduTrack/FrontPage with two links: http://linus.yorktown.arlington.k12.va.us/PyCon2004/EduTrack/IllBeThere and http://linus.yorktown.arlington.k12.va.us/PyCon2004/EduTrack/PresentationPr… I'm trying to get a sense of the level of interest in an Educational Track at the conference. So far, all but a few of the responses have been from Yorktown High students, and there are only a few presentation ideas. I don't know what the time line is for making a decision, but if the level of interest remains low, it might be best to just roll the three presentation propasals into one of the other tracks and give up on having an Edu track this year. Please let me know what you think... Thanks! -- Jeffrey Elkner <jeff(a)elkner.net> Open Book Project <http://ibiblio.org/obp>

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matplotlib: a Python plotting library
by Simon Willison 28 Oct '03

28 Oct '03

I just spotted this on the Daily Python-URL: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html """ matplotlib is a pure python plotting library designed to bring publication quality plotting to python with a syntax familiar to matlab users. A lot progress towards this goal has been made since the first release of matplotlib (see goals), the library does produce high quality 2D plots. All of the plotting commands can be accessed either via a functional interface familiar to matlab users or an object oriented interface familiar to python users, and several high resolution output formats are supported """ This looks like it could be a valuable tool for promoting Python in higher education. -- Simon Willison Web development weblog: http://simon.incutio.com/

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SpeedTree - The Valley Real-Time Demo
by Jason Cunliffe 25 Oct '03

25 Oct '03

http://www.idvinc.com/html/the_valley.htm It's a holy grail of the real-time world: An outdoor environment of realistic foliage that runs efficiently but features off-line quality. The Valley delivers. Windblown trees and grass that look real from ANY distance (even within the tree itself!), along with bump mapped bark textures, specular effects, and a variety of shadow effects. The perfect complement to our Huge Forest of a million trees, The Valley is an unprecedented celebration of SpeedTree's aesthetic versatility, range and power. The full source code for The Valley will be available to all SpeedTreeRT evaluators with the release of SpeedTreeRT 1.6.

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re: The trackball reality
by Arthur 24 Oct '03

24 Oct '03

Dethe writes - >On the other hand, python is easier than (in my >experience) C, C++,Objective C, Pascal, Postscript, Forth, Java, >Javascript, Perl, etc. In some cases it is so >much easier that it almost appears *easy* in comparison. But there is a huge >difference between *easier*, even vastly easier, and *easy*. My only experience of the languages on your list is Java. In some fundamental way I think it is easier. The do and don'ts are more clearly defined. In a relatively short amount of time I fellt that I had learned Java, to the extent I was interested in learning Java. I am not there yet with Python. Which I find more intriguing. more empowering, more complex and much more fun. Art

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re: The trackball reality
by Arthur 24 Oct '03

24 Oct '03

>From the Nielson quote: >Although you could imagine a society where language was easy to learn because people communicated by pointing to words >and icons on large menus they carried about, humans have instead chosen to invest many years in mastering a rich and >complex language. Which could be said to relate to my contrarian view about Python. Its hard as shit to learn, really. Four years into it, and I consider myself a rank novice. I am not extraordinarily bright, but certainly not stupid. Why would Python seem to want to avoid identifying itself as rich, and *complex*. As central to its claims toward having educational value. The best that it can be is no more complex than it needs to be to allow empowerment at a level of depth that - to someone like myself - is truly interesting. Python fools me into thinking this is largely so. But I am no expert on the alternatives. I wish it would seem to me less agains the grain to feel that the proper approach is promoting the learning of Python as an difficult, arduous but worthwhile effort. I think we set up people approaching it with other expectations for likely defeat. Art

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re: The trackball reality
by Arthur 24 Oct '03

24 Oct '03

Jim writes - >As an alternative view, the programming language that I found most >productive in the past and that made me understand OOP was Prograph. You thankfully disarm me in talking about your personal experience, not that of subjects. And it would be stupid of me to argue that your experience is not your experience. I also discussed with my HCI professor my frustration in trying to communicate with acamadicians about these matters. My starting point - not long ago - being unaware of there even being a field called HCI. But knowing my own experience. And unwilling to accept that a naive view - on these matters - is not a substantive view, nonetheless. And allowing myself some cynicism in respect to what is being passed off as "informed". Which is derivative of other cynicisms, no doubt. Having my own sense of what informed might mean, when assessing the academic approach to some of these matters. That being said, I was told that my postion had some resonance with some of what he has read from Jakob Nielson, and he recommended I take a look. Nielsen apparently a highly influential man in the world of HCI. The most on point thing I come up with is "The Anti-Mac Interface" http://www.acm.org/cacm/AUG96/antimac.htm Besides talking about the "central role of language" in this alternative view, come this: """ Expert Users The GUIs of contemporary applications are generally well designed for ease of learning, but there often is a trade-off between ease of learning on one hand, and ease of use, power, and flexibility on the other hand. Although you could imagine a society where language was easy to learn because people communicated by pointing to words and icons on large menus they carried about, humans have instead chosen to invest many years in mastering a rich and complex language. Today's children will spend a large fraction of their lives communicating with computers. We should think about the trade-offs between ease of learning and power in computer-human interfaces. If there were a compensating return in increased power, it would not be unreasonable to expect a person to spend several years learning to communicate with computers, just as we now expect children to spend 20 years mastering their native language. """ I reproduce it as thought provoking, not gospel. Certainly Nielson himself is not presenting it as such. But it allows us to speculate that the ease of learning on one hand, and suitability for contributing to the process of creating human beings empowered in respect to their ability to interface with technology (maybe my redefintion of "HCI") might - in some substantial respects - be opposing, not complementary goals. Unfortunately enough. But not surprisingly, at all. Art

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The trackball reality
by Arthur 24 Oct '03

24 Oct '03

(I wrote this, so may as well send it out somewhere - edu-sig being the victim) Am I lost in a conspiracy theory? Dammit if I don't hate consporiacy theories. But the fact is that I have a business, rather than technical background. And in most contexts, I put no value judgments on the workings of the marketplace. I feel differently about education. At a wedding of an old friend I was introduced to a gentlemen who was a professor of HCI at a New York university. Who freely talked of the funding of grants to departments like his from corporations like Micorosoft and IBM for HCI studies related to the educational use of software. One could choose to conclude that these Corporations were "giving something back" to the community by providing these grants for these kinds of studies. If one had a good sense of humor. And the nature of the studies he described were no surprise to me. And it seemed to be consistent. "Useabiliy studies" related to highly graphical, game-like interfaces for educational software. I am perfectly convinced that if I were given 25 grant proposals to assess - based on choice of rhetoric, prosposed techniques to be employed, citations it selects to highlight, etc. - it would be child's play to identify those studies inclined to come to conclusions supportive of ideas I might find "interesting". And its my money and I will fund the projects I find "interesting". Who could dispute that? Much of the value I see in Python in education is in providing an important tool for an alternative approach. And alterntive reality, where maintaining a decent emphasis on word-based, text-based, keyboard based apsects of HCI. Not becuase it is more "useable" - but only because, in particular, what we are looking to achieve is "learning". "Learning" needing to be in quotes, because that is the crux of the matter. Because if one defines "learning" as what one might gain from interfacing a computer with a trackball, then one will conclude that the trackball is a great interface for learning. Of course - its a simple tautology. And if I prefer to define "learning" as what one gains by interfacing with the keyboard - I simply can't loose to trackball. Who is prepared to define learning? I insist that whatever it is, its definition has not been changed fundamentally by the advent of data processing machinary. Though great learning went into its advent - to be sure. Having no funding or the resources to fund studies *I* would find "interesting" - all I can claim to have is a Zen position, which has an atttendent bit of ideology attached. But that is what is in controversy, really - as far as I can see. If anything I am a backward looking (I perfer that to "reactionary") - for the *important* stuff, I think it important to look backward and try to understand if we have lost, and - if so - what we have lost, and why, and how might we regain as much of it as we can. And it is fully plausible to me that we have lost much in the realm of education. But there is nothing inconsistent to me in a position that it is fully plausible that computers could and probably should play an important role in retrieving some of this. But this is - in my view - the antithesis of redefining what is "learning". The support for these kinds of redefinitons - which would be considered radical, were there not so many mainstream forces addressing it as if it were not - is something to the effect that we are preparing citizens for a new reality. The trackball reality, Who's reality is that? Art >Games tend to push the envelope of computing, especially for user interfaces, and nearly every aspect of computer >science must be addressed in the context of a game, so they are great learning tools. And there is nothing like games to hold >attention or motivate kids.

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kidspiration- linux
by mike re-v 22 Oct '03

22 Oct '03

Hello, Can anyone point me to an open-source graphic organizer like the commercial Inspiration/Kidspiration? Thanks re-v __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com

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linux
by Conrad Koziol 22 Oct '03

22 Oct '03

hey can someone point me too sites which advocate linux over microsoft. I have to do a persuasive essay in english, and was hoping to make a case for everyones favorite operating system. I need sources and info which i cant think of. Thanks a lot

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Re: Design Pattern question
by Lee Harr 21 Oct '03

21 Oct '03

>I wondered if anyone had ideas about a design pattern I've been playing >with. Is it perverse? > >I don't want to create global variables at the module level, but have a lot >of information that many objects need to share and keep current about, >possibly update. I don't always know these variables at the time my >objects >get initialized. Some become available later. > >So the idea is to have my classes inherit from a base class the main >purpose >of which is to get runtime "globals". These may be defined well after the >subclass objects have been initialized. > >Also, I don't explicitly initialize this shared parent class either (it >doesn't have an __init__ method) -- I just stuff it with variables at the >class level when I want to communicate them to the children. > I think I might find it confusing because of the way names get bound to certain things at class level, but overridden at the instance level. Like this: >>>class Holder: ... pass ... >>>class Foo(Holder): ... def __init__(self): ... self.a = 1 ... >>>o=Foo() >>>o.a 1 >>>Holder.b = 3 >>>o.b 3 >>>class Goo(Holder): ... def __init__(self): ... self.q = 2 ... >>>k=Goo() >>>k.q 2 >>>k.b 3 >>>o.b=5 >>>k.b 3 >>>Holder.b=5 >>>k.b 5 >>>k.b=7 >>>Holder.b 5 So, one instance changing the value does not change it in other instances, unless they all always explicitly access it as Holder.x What I have done (and I am certainly not saying it is the best way, or even any better than what you have) is to create a separate module that just holds a bunch of names that many other modules need to access. Everyone always refers to it by it's full name and so everyone always has the same information. It's kind of a global namespace that is not global, if that makes any sense. In pygsear, it is the conf module. Some things that I keep in there are the size of the window, sound system status, time count (ticks), and I am probably going to put a handle for the currently running Game instance there too. _________________________________________________________________ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail

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