Mailman 3 July 2006 - Edu-sig

Re: [Edu-sig] Alan Kay - another one of his ideas
by Daniel Ajoy 12 Jul '06

12 Jul '06

> From: Ian Bicking <ianb(a)colorstudy.com> > > (There's even a > Logo/Java plugin: http://turtletracks.sourceforge.net/) Not one, but many. Here is an unusual one (similar in concept to GvR?): http://tinyurl.com/p5xwr http://school.eb.com/lm/manipulatives/enu/workspaces/ ladybug_maze/workspace.html Daniel

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Re: [Edu-sig] Alan Kay - another one of his ideas
by Daniel Ajoy 12 Jul '06

12 Jul '06

> From: Ian Bicking <ianb(a)colorstudy.com> > Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Alan Kay - another one of his ideas > > Using Logo Wiki as a way to encourage people to download a plugin would > be a mistake IMHO. Putting all your code into a little dead box > embedded on a web page is pretty lame, and it shows. There's only two > kinds of plugins that matter anymore: video (Quicktime, Windows Media, > etc) and Flash. And Flash is taking over video too. Everything else is > entirely dead (and good riddance!). Plugins of various kinds have been > done many, many times, and failed many, many times. (There's even a > Logo/Java plugin: http://turtletracks.sourceforge.net/) > > OTOH, if you really want fancy output, you want Flash pure and simple. > I'm glad Logo Wiki is in Javascript and uses the canvas, but if they > really want more control and graphical power then Flash is the obvious > next step. > Here is a subset of Logo (The turtle graphics subset) in Spanish implemented in Flash: http://mondragon.angeltowns.net/paradiso/LogoFlash.html One of it's deficiencies is that the projects can't be really stored from session to session. They vanish when the browser window is closed. Daniel

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Crunchy Frog, Spiny Norman, edupython in general
by Michael Tobis 12 Jul '06

12 Jul '06

I'll be giving a brief talk and trying to facilitate discussion at ChiPy (the Chicago Python association) tomorrow (July 13) evening (7 PM) in downtown Chicago (Performics, 180 N Lasalle, suite 1100) on Crunchy Frog, Spiny Norman, and networked tools for education (Note there will also be a talk on parsing and a talk on Perl 6. Order of presentations is pretty much figured out informally on the spot...) Spiny Norman is my (as yet very preliminary) answer to Jeff Elkner's request for a doctest based testing tool, which is amazingly orthogonal to Andre's approach to a doctest based teaching tool, which was also inpired by Jeff as I understand it. Related topics have recently generated quite a lot of discussion on the chipy mailing list ( http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago ). mt

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xturtle - talk at EuroPython2006
by Gregor Lingl 12 Jul '06

12 Jul '06

Hi everyone, the slides to my talk at Europython2006 *xturtle - an extended turtle module for Python as a vehicle for teaching programming concepts* are now available: http://indico.cern.ch/materialDisplay.py?contribId=100&sessionId=52&amp… Regards, Gregor

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The best way to predict the future...
by Arthur 12 Jul '06

12 Jul '06

...is to predict the future. Which I think I did fairly well, when I began - some 5 years ago - talking about the ideas of Alan Kay as extremely relevant to the business of edu-sig. What I seem to have gotten wrong is the fact that giving forum to those ideas; praise, implicit and explicit of those ideas; encouragement to the Python community to embrace those ideas is what is relevant. Critique of those ideas, encouragement of the Python community to resist them and to work to create a viable alternative to them is what is not. My bad. My effort at creating , informed by an alternative world view, is progressing. Many of the suggestions that Andre had given me when I asked for some feedback here earlier have been implemented. Lot's of hard work. Including extending/abusing the framework of the pudge automated documentation generation tool to, I think, pretty good effect. See http://pudge.lesscode.org/ for the tool: and http://pygeo.sourceforge.net/docs/module-base.geometry_real.html for example output. I have worked out one thing that was bothering me, i.e. lack of control on the ordering of modules in index documentation and such, but have not put up the new output as of yet. Beyond the auto-generated docs, a Overview document has been written that is an effort to express PyGeo's vision of itself. http://pygeo.sourceforge.net/docs/Overview.html as well as a document in progress on approaching the PyGeo application code as a readable document, geared toward those without prior experience in undertaking such an effort. http://pygeo.sourceforge.net/docs/codeanatomy.html PyGeo is what it is, but it is at this point hard to take seriously not taking it seriously. Andre's feedback had in fact been very helpful to me in getting to this stage. I am still a little bit away from a new release and an announcement. Any feedback in the meantime is relevant and welcome. Art

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Fwd: The best way to predict the future...
by kirby urner 11 Jul '06

11 Jul '06

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: kirby urner <kirby.urner(a)gmail.com> Date: Jul 11, 2006 12:03 PM Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] The best way to predict the future... To: "ajsiegel(a)optonline.net" <ajsiegel(a)optonline.net> On 7/11/06, ajsiegel(a)optonline.net <ajsiegel(a)optonline.net> wrote: > > Kirby - > > Let's spare everyone the Itchy and Scratchy seqel, and leave it that we sees > things differently. > Agreed. Actions, not words, matter more at this point. Edu-sig needn't be our theater (doesn't mean it ain't a fun place to visit). Kirby

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Kusasa
by kirby urner 07 Jul '06

07 Jul '06

For those of you interested in Mark Shuttleworth's Kusasa Project, I have these wiki links to share, from the wiki. Project Charter - http://wiki.tsf.org.za/Project_Charter Scope Statement - http://wiki.tsf.org.za/Project_Scope Kirby

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Teaching Python to Technologists
by kirby urner 07 Jul '06

07 Jul '06

I've pretty much finished up my small contract with Bernie's geokem.com, which involved two scopions in a jar: a Python scorpion versus a Java scorpion (I was the Python scorpion). Bernie had us fight it out, in a kind of double blind experiment, with himself as referee (only he could see who was winning). I dwelt on the dictionary (as a built-in data structure) and the csv reader (native to the Standard Library csv module) as especially relevant to his work. Numeric indexing of large tables introduce extraneous X,Y coordinates where the original spreadsheet had more mnemonically meaningful axes: sample IDs (rows) vs chemical names (columns). A dictionary of dictionaries will take you to any cell on the spreadsheet -- e.g. samples['HAWAII0626']['FeO2'] -- and this is *especially* useful when the community has no agreed upon order for the columns (the rows are by definition unsorted as well). If you're going to analyze something as quicksandy as a csv file with ever-shifting column headers, better to use names, not positionality, to grab values. A numeric index approach is too risky -- you might actually get a working GIGO program, and not know the chemicals you wanted were now ordered differently. My solution guards against that sorry outcome. I wrote it all up in a 10 page PDF, plus provided working source code, a lot of it built around Python geokem had already internalized (Bernie used to write everything in Pascal). What I've found interesting about teaching Python to technology professionals is a lot depends on imparting our somewhat unfamiliar jargon. For example, the first row of the csv file is different from all the others, in that it contains headers (chemical names). Then these particular files have footers as well, separated from the data block by blank lines. So rather than using a for loop, I used a while True, with a .next() method. It's that .next() that's confusing. What does it mean? Well, the csv.csv_reader returns an iterable. So I use .next() the first time to parse headers, then loop inside a while loop until a blank line is encountered, building a dictionary as I go. Even regular open file objects have a next method (not to be used in combination with readline). I ended up explaining this by means of StringIO (which simulates file objects using strings). As to whether Python or Java won this particular bout, I think New Zealand is a little behind the times (still teaching C++ as a first language in CS). However, my hash table approach, getting away from integer indexing, may at least inform the Java-based solution, as it'd be no trouble to use the same approach in that language. Anyway, I think Bernie is sold on the value of Python. It's more just rumors (about Python being "undocumented" for example) which slow its acceptance in a knowledge domain (geochemistry) that could really use some computing savvy. Per Bernie, most geochemists use their PCs for email and word processing and that's about it. The ability to program is a lost art across the board, in many sciences as well as the humanities. Kirby

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rich data structure?
by Daniel Ajoy 07 Jul '06

07 Jul '06

The natural resources of countries and some other entities http://www.xist.org/earth/ec_natres.aspx Daniel

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ANN: (Intensive) Intro to Python course, Aug 16-18, San Francisco
by w chun 05 Jul '06

05 Jul '06

Greetings! Below is the announcement we've just made this morning to CLP about our upcoming Python course. Please forward this msg to anyone whom you think would be interested or would benefit from Python training courses. This includes Plone, Zope, Django, TurboGears, and Mailman groups as well. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2006-July/350187.html Significant discounts to students/teachers! Thanks for your time! -Wesley - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Core Python Programming", Prentice Hall, (c)2007,2001 http://corepython.com wesley.j.chun :: wescpy-at-gmail.com python training and technical consulting cyberweb.consulting : silicon valley, ca http://cyberwebconsulting.com

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