Mailman 3 May 2007 - Edu-sig

PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program
by Nicolas Pettiaux May 19, 2007

May 19, 2007

This Google summer of code 2007 project has not yet, as far as I have noticed, been mentioned here, and many of you could be interested and also willing to share ideas and maybe coding. Title PyStart - Python Programming teaching/testing program Student Jason Lee Roy Brower Mentor Pete Savage Abstract PyStart will give teachers a way to work with programming students. And best of all, the students programs can be graded almost automatically will very little review from the teacher. PyStart will review code for the proper entries in the code and for the proper output. It will be created for beginners of programming. The goal of PyStart is to teach the basics of all programming skills. For example, loops and variable types. http://code.google.com/soc/ubuntu/appinfo.html?csaid=F43382157E7D628C https://wiki.ubuntu.com/GoogleSoC2007/python-trainer -- Nicolas Pettiaux - email: nicolas.pettiaux(a)ael.be Utiliser des formats ouverts et des logiciels libres - http://passeralinux.org

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Sneak Peak...
by kirby urner May 13, 2007

May 13, 2007

Sneak peak at my latest Pythonic Math write-up (CP4E files): http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/pymath.html Great meeting summaya at BarCamp recently, including Kevin Altis of PythonCard fame **. Kirby === ** I recently demoed PythonCard to Wanderers, in part to contrast assembly language device driving of pixels, vs. painting to a canvas supported by the OS and widget libraries -- PythonCard being an example of the latter strategy, Wanderer Bill Sheppard being an example of an assembly language programmer in my class.

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BarCamp Portland
by kirby urner May 12, 2007

May 12, 2007

So this is turning out to be an amazingly productive venue from a networking point of view. I had no idea that US Bank had allowed its back office on Grand to become this CubeSpace establishment, just perfect for geeks looking to bliss out in some freewheeling social networking extravaganza. It's all managed by Wiki -- and I'm pretty sure that was Ward Cunningham I saw a couple times (inventor of Wiki), but he doesn't remember me from PORPIG days I'm thinking. PORPIG was our Portland Interest Group, spearheaded by Kevin Altis, who has gotten back in the loop, now that our Dallas friend, temporarily in PDX, is taking the helm and steering our Python Meetups. Just the other night, six of us, unknown to one another, shared enough critical info to keep the ball rolling, such that in 45 mins or so, we'll meetup again, this time in the context of Barcamp. The topic is restarting PORPIG, if that's what we're even calling it these days. Perlmongers certainly has their act together, with lots of signage around. http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2007/05/barcamp-portland.html http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2007/05/qyoobin.html One of the attractions here are the XOs, along with the Wii. I've spotting maybe four XOs so far, those Negroponte laptops, bright green with rabbit ears, running Linux, lots of clever hardware adaptations. I don't have my memory card adapter on me, so the pictures, which I'll add to my Flickr album and syndicate through Splashcast, will have to wait a few hours. Anyway, you've probably seen loads of pix by now, given this is edu-sig, and OLPC has been a topic for like months by now. I also finished Class 4 of 5 today, bringing my middle and high schoolers into the 21st century, climbing a 20th century ladder called "vector algebra" (for the model), plus OpenGL and raytracer (for views), Python the controller. http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2007/05/class-notes-session-four.html It's all so "traditional," this stuff, in the sense that we're backward compatible with the textbooks. Vectors are not a new invention by this time. But who wants to publish to wood pulp anymore? We're pretty pixel-oriented these days, using screens as our mathematical canvases. Anyway, back to the chat channel and networking. Getting people to cruise by one's cube is a fine art, akin to cosmic fishing -- something Nirel is better at than me I'd hazard (maybe not though -- I'm pretty good as a recruiter). Kirby

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Python for Wanderers (Class 2)
by kirby urner May 11, 2007

May 11, 2007

I'm numbering from 0, Python style, so this was actually our third meeting in the boyhood home of 2x Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, sitting around the big table, with projector (Optoma), speakers (including woofer), and laptop (Toshiba Satellite, WinXP w/ Python 2.5, VPython, POV-Ray 3.6, wxPython and PythonCard). The course for adults parallels my Saturday Academy course to some degree and I again showed Code Guardian as an opening cartoon feature, to show what one guy and some friends could now accomplish with a rendering engine, given sufficient talent, skills and commitment (can't trivialize any of those, if the end result is great art, which Code Guardian certainly is (cee-gee.net)). By way of intro on the whiteboard (erasable colored pens), I drew three partially overlapping circles, Venn Diagram style (each overlapping the others, a place in the center where they all overlappped). In the circles I wrote M, V, C for Model, View, Controller. I quickly connected MVC to a history of programming we'd already developed: (i) wild west spaghetti code era, deriving from hard wiring (ii) compiled imperative languages (COBOL, Hopper) (iii) structured programming (Djikstra), (iv) then more sophisiticated paradigms, including OO and then DP, where DP = design patterns, let's say premised on OOP, and where MVC is one very common design pattern people talk about. In this class, M, our model, depends mostly on the XYZ Cartesian style math kids already learn as a part of middle and high school, i.e. the usual pre-college analytical geometry pioneered by Descartes, Fermat and folks like that, already very entrenched, and later, via Hamilton, Gibbs, Heaviside and others, becoming today's "vector algebra" from whence the term "vector graphics" is derived. So for a Model, we're using high school analytic geometry and vector algebra. Good way to lean both, with Python mediating. Start with Dog and Monkey as subclasses of Mammal, to get familiar with a few __rib__ special names, the whole idea of classes, subclasses and objects, then move to "math objects" (more abstract) such as Vector, Edge and Polyhedron. V, our view, comes in two basic flavors: (A) real time and (B) render time. In real time, you get such as OpenGL, with a simplifying VPython facade, and/or DirectX or whatever. Engines that respond in real time to give a game-like experience (or a game). Doom by id set the standard when PCs were still new, showing what intelligent coding could accomplish, in terms of a first person shooter, with the minimal hardware of the day. The games have only gotten more impressive since then. And yet when it comes to attention to small detail and photo- realism, the real time games still can't reach the level of a rendered movie, like 'Shrek' or 'Cars' or 'Over the Hedge'. That's because in render time we have all the time we need to trace every ray of light, to get those photo-realistic frames, which only at the end get strung together and projected at a real time frame rate. So this counts as our other broad category of View -- not like these are the only two, plus many times we interleave them, i.e. a real time game will suddenly switch to a canned loop developed with ray tracing. To give students "cave painting" [1] insight into both kinds of view, we use Python as our controller (C). Python talking to VPython represents real time animation and simulation, ala the game engines, whereas Python talking to POV-Ray represents render time animation ala the movies, movies like Code Guardian. Python also implements a lot of the Model, in that the polyhedra and vector algebra we need is all exposed in source code, in the form of stickworks.py and polyhedra.py. There's a minimal Vector class, wrapped around VPython's, which we actually keep using when writing Scene Description Language for POV-Ray -- because in terms of the model, a vector is a vector and all we need is to be able to add and scale them (__add__ and __mul__ them). In sum, I'm seeing these major themes emerge from this course, which I'm regarding as open source and transferrable, usable by other teachers and/or peers teaching peers (which explains the screencasts): (1) history of computer programming, emergence of OO and DP (2) MVC as a DP example, with broad categories of V being (a) real time (games, some simulations, musc visualizers, screen savers) (b) render time (cartoons, some simulations, Animusic, photo-realistic static screen savers) (3) Python is implementation language (4) Vector graphics and analytic geometry for controlling the model (5) Python playing well with others, gluing together different kinds of engine (in this case OpenGL and POV-Ray). All of the above I think proves quite an eye opener for middle and high schoolers, not only in terms of reinforcing their everyday math and giving them entre to a powerful programming language, but in terms of giving a "how things work" overview of a lot of state of the art technology. Other courses will showcase different aspects of course. Like in my course for Winterhaven (Portland Public), we focused on XML (xml_rpc), GIS (Google Earth), and even a little on MySQL (my geographic quiz showcases USA states and capitals, very traditional, but with this Pythonic layer between a database and the web, ala LAMP) [2]. Kirby [1] "cave painting" means "enough of a semblance to give the idea but minus much detail" (say "dumbing down" if you like but I prefer "homomorphism" (vs. an "isomorphism")) i.e. an analogy with many dimensions missing by design). Example usage: http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1418476 [2] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/2005-November/005533.html http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/geoquiz.html

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Re: [Edu-sig] Some thoughts on the word "Laptop"
by Laura Creighton May 11, 2007

May 11, 2007

Would 'the children's computer' work better? Laura

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OLPC on NPR ToTN Today
by Gary Pajer May 10, 2007

May 10, 2007

The subject for today's (Wednesday 9 May 07) edition of National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation".

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OLPC game jam
by Laura Creighton May 9, 2007

May 9, 2007

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/GameJam Hope they have one closer to me, soon. Laura

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Portland Python Group Regalvanized
by kirby urner May 9, 2007

May 9, 2007

Event: http://python.meetup.com/183/ PORPIG (Portland Python Interest Group) has restarted thanks to ZeOmega's Brad Allen, visiting from Dallas on a wxPython job involving document handling (Word -> OpenOffice -> PDF -> TIFF). He's working on the thick client for inhouse users, with others doing the Zope web server component. Jason cued me to SQLalchemy and Bar Camp: http://www.sqlalchemy.org/ http://barcamp.org/BarCampPortland Note: Freedom Toasters weren't the topic @ the London Summit, just they happened in South Africa, tend to be orange and black (pretty!): http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&gbv=2&q=%22freedom+toasters%… I bet Allen Taylor, in the adult Python for Wanderers I'm doing at the Linus Pauling house on Thursdays, will be intrigued by SQL Alchemy, given we writes SQL for Dummies, plus this other one: http://www.amazon.com/All-One-Reference-Dummies-Computer/dp/0470119284/ref=… Finally I learned about this Python Advocacy group, different from python-marketing. I think I'll study the archive awhile. Chances are the ball is already rolling down the hill, gathering steam, plenty fast, doesn't really need more pushing from lil' me. Kirby

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laptop backlash
by Michael Tobis May 8, 2007

May 8, 2007

The NY Times had an article last week about schools backing off the idea of laptops for students. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html a snippet: ==> So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse. Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not. "After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none," said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students' hands. "The teachers were telling us when there's a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It's a distraction to the educational process." <== It's not surprising, really, but the timing is not good. Hoping the OLPC folks are at least aware of this trend. mt

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Re: [Edu-sig] interesting article about the future of user platforms
by Laura Creighton May 8, 2007

May 8, 2007

Thank you very much for the kind words. If you haven're read Tufte, you will likely enjoy reading him. I also recommend the lesser known _The Theory and Aesthetic of Design_ and _The Theory and Art of Workmanship_, both by David Pye. David Pye was an architect and a professor of furniture design, as well as a wood worker. So his books are for anybody who has ever designed _anything_ and who has built anything. While Chris Alexander's Pattern Language for architects has had an effect on software development, directly influencing Design Patterns, David Pye is still virtually unknown. I think that this is very sad, because the book on workmanship in particular I think is vital to understanding what it is that we are doing. I think that these days it is fashionable to believe that the 'good things' we see in the created world are good because they were _designed_ well. And they may well have been. But what was crucial, often, was not the design but the workmanship. I see things like the XP and agile movement as significant attempts to improve the quality of the workmanship in our profession. If you get the chance, read David Pye, and see what you think. By the way, I am most heartily impressed with the amount of work you have accomplished on the python-advocacy front. Those of us who have fought the monsters of 'we like things just the way they are' in the Python community have accumulated an impressive list of burn-outs. But looks like you fought the fight -- and won. Some day I would like it if you taught me _how_ you managed it. Like all good magicians, you make it look effortless, when I know it is anything but. You take care, Laura Creighton

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