Mailman 3 September 2008 - Edu-sig

Fwd: PyCon 2009 - Call for proposals
by Andre Roberge 27 Sep '08

27 Sep '08

(Apologies to Ivan for sending him a message directly rather than to the list which I meant to do. André) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andre Roberge <andre.roberge(a)gmail.com> Date: 2008/9/26 Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] PyCon 2009 - Call for proposals To: Ivan Krstić <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 9:13 PM, Ivan Krstić <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> wrote: > Hi folks, > > PyCon '09 will be opening for talk proposals shortly; see below. We'd love > to have some great talks on Python in education, so please don't be shy! > > Cheers, > > Ivan Krstić > Chair, PyCon 2009 Program Committee > > Rising up to Ivan's challenge... After missing last year's Pycon, I have been hoping of going this year, and talk about Crunchy. There are many aspects I could cover and was wondering what people would be most interested in. For example: 1. using Crunchy's doctest feature as a teaching tool. (including an experimental "exam mode" soon to be incorporated in Crunchy's trunk). 2. using Crunchy's unittest feature as a teaching tool. (unittest mode was implemented this summer as part of Google SoC) 3. using the "code analyzer" feature to provide feedback to students. (again from this summer's SoC; using pylint or pyflakes or pychecker). 4. using the simple interface to pdb (soon to be incorporated in the trunk) 5. using a mini-language environment (Karel the robot/rur-ple) 6. using the Croquant (a MoinMoin extension) and Crunchy in combination to create educational resources. etc. I could give a talk that would be a survey of all that's available in Crunchy (version 1.0 should be out before the new year) or go in depth on a couple of topics. Alternatively, I could go and give an in-depth look as how to write a simple (and a not-so-simple) plugin for Crunchy, extending its capabilities... Any comment/suggestions/things you'd like to see? André P.S. For those that understand French, Florian Birée gave a presentation that included many of the new features of Crunchy (some of which where mentioned above) at Toulouse France; this presentation (55 minutes) has been recorded on video and is available at http://toulibre.org/Videos (2nd from the bottom).

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More news from Oregon
by kirby urner 26 Sep '08

26 Sep '08

Reviewing some of the history from my angle: we did some pilots with Python in Portland Public Schools at the geek flagship, Winterhaven, both before my family joined, and afterward, me picking up McCarty's 8th grade one day a week for some field testing of new ideas, including projecting Google Earth, xml-rpc, etc. (Python + DOM might be a better name for it, would change the mix more in favor of JavaScript if doing it again). Then I switched over to older students via Saturday Academy, publishing write-ups to edu-sig and to my blog. Now we (my partnership) is hammering out this Python Briefing and promoting it to such as the Software Association of Oregon and the Center for Advanced Learning, places like that, with the idea being to help with inservice training of already embedded faculty. The situation in Oregon has been: Java for AP compsci (high school level), but the state institutions of higher ed not being that keen on accepting ETS certification, meaning many bothering with AP compsci have been aiming at higher ed in neighboring states, Utah especially, where I understand the Java curriculum gets college credits. Python has made inroads in this or that classroom (I don't pretend to having a lot of overview data on this, don't sit in State offices set up to monitor such things, if they even exist) based on anecdotal evidence collected at SAO planning meetings at Willamette University (attended with a team from Free Geek, a few years ago now). My approach has always been different (though not original with me, Kenneth Iverson an inspiration): to challenge the standard mathematics curriculum to update or die, meaning if you stick with those calculators, you'll get creamed by the new charters we're floating. That's a polemical way of stating it though, need to be more diplomatic on the ground, plus it's usually not the teacher that's the bottleneck, but the subservient attitude of curriculum writers towards big publishing houses and their paper-wasting ways. Computer programming languages are "disruptive technology" pure and simple, and there's no easy way to phase them in to high school mathematics classes without breaking backward compatibility in some ways, duh. Internationally, it's a somewhat different picture, with some schools systems realizing they have nothing to lose, and so more willing to experiment with the new tools. And of course homeschoolers are all over the map with this stuff, often regular school students by day, i.e. they homeschool after hours, when having access to YouTube, other essentials. So I've found a lot of international collaborators willing to leverage what we're able to develop for our Oregon and Washington region (Silicon Forest), Gerald de Jong for example (a Java guy more than Python). Anyway, the long and short of it is I'm still working with that charter in Alaska I mentioned in my Chicago talk, hammering on ASCII - to - Unicode as a "major story of our time" don't care what class it's taught in (sociology? anthropology?). Basically, if it's taught nowhere in the high school, it's not up to standard. Of course that doesn't mean "state standard" in all cases, which is where we might say something not entirely charitable about this or that slow poke of a state, doesn't even teach kids the very basics. But then, who said state legislatures should be in the curriculum writing business in the first place, is a legitimate question. In Oregon, private industry still has a say too (and why not, we know what a lot of the jobs are like). I'm also continuing to collaborate with Ian Benson on some of this SQL stuff (need to be teaching SQL in algebra, or what good is it?), other professional mathematicians. Not everyone wants to get out in front in the "math wars" understandably. Especially this Bucky stuff is controversial, lots of media stirrings thanks to Whitney Museum in New York, on to Chicago next. Plus there's a play opening in Portland soon **, which only helps me with the geometry teachers, as they see a way to connect more to these extra-curricular events. As for how "Bucky stuff" ties to Python in my little world, that's too big a topic for here. Hypertoons and rbf.py are two points of contact, or check these Focal Points in my blog: http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/09/focal-points.html Kirby Urner 4Dsolutions.net ** http://www.pcs.org/bucky/

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PyCon 2009 - Call for proposals
by Ivan Krstić 25 Sep '08

25 Sep '08

Hi folks, PyCon '09 will be opening for talk proposals shortly; see below. We'd love to have some great talks on Python in education, so please don't be shy! Cheers, Ivan Krstić Chair, PyCon 2009 Program Committee Call for proposals -- PyCon 2009 -- <http://us.pycon.org/2009/> =============================================================== Want to share your experience and expertise? PyCon 2009 is looking for proposals to fill the formal presentation tracks. The PyCon conference days will be March 27-29, 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, preceded by the tutorial days (March 25-26), and followed by four days of development sprints (March 30-April 2). Previous PyCon conferences have had a broad range of presentations, from reports on academic and commercial projects to tutorials and case studies. We hope to continue that tradition this year. Online proposal submission will open on September 29, 2008. Proposals will be accepted through November 03, with acceptance notifications coming out on December 15. For the detailed call for proposals, please see: <http://us.pycon.org/2009/conference/proposals/> We look forward to seeing you in Chicago! -- Ivan Krstić <krstic(a)solarsail.hcs.harvard.edu> | http://radian.org

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further exploration
by michel paul 20 Sep '08

20 Sep '08

I took the kids to the lab yesterday. I had our tech guy install VPython. It's great finally having a tech guy who has done some programming! Again, this is a Functions, Statistics, Trig class, although the curriculum is actually organized as Statistics, Functions, Trig. I'm going to suggest reversing that next time, but in a weird way it actually worked starting off with statistics and using list comprehension for sigma. I just told them don't freak out, this is meant as an introduction, so relax and notice how you can read the code almost like a natural language, that's all you need to see right now. Regarding standard deviation, I said don't memorize formulas. Just learn these concepts: 1. Standard deviation is the square root of variance. 2. Variance is the mean of the squared deviations. 3. Deviation is difference from the mean. Using list comprehension you can express each of these thoughts in a set of one liners. All we need are functions for mean(L), deviations(L), and squares(L). Then we're all set to define the variance(L) as the mean of the squared deviations of L. That last sentence right there easily translates into def variance(L): return mean(squares(deviations(L))). I know that some of them appreciated the elegance of that. There definitely were some who got it. I think seeing the ideas spelled out like that is way better than using a statistical software package. This way they can own their thinking. Its just a matter of getting them to buy into it. So I took them to the lab and had them use these functions and then create histograms using VPython. I embedded the VPython syntax for them into simpler functions like histogram(L, intervals), so all they had to do was supply some data and their preferred categories. Toward the end of class I clued them in on the 'examples' folder in VPython and had them explore random blocks and stonehenge. They loved it. They oohed and ahhed when I had them use the mouse buttons to dive in. And then I just let them explore. It was great. There has still been some resistance or disinterest on the part of some students, but I think this impressed even them. There's still the factor of kids who might remain resistant because it seems overwhelming and they feel intimidated by it all, and the 3D stuff might have scared them some more. I don't know how many might still be in that category, but that's what I have to find out next. - Michel

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light-bot another one like Karel
by Daniel Ajoy 19 Sep '08

19 Sep '08

In flash: http://www.gameroo.nl/games/light-bot Daniel

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Orienting newcomers...
by kirby urner 17 Sep '08

17 Sep '08

We know from feedback that having an interactive shell makes a huge difference, in terms of what's to like about Python. As I'm delivering to skeptics a lot of the time, who think I'm maybe back stabbing other languages that deserve more respect, I'm sure to mention that Python isn't the only interactive interpreter based language reducing to bytecodes for virtual machine execution under the hood. There's Jython as well. Joke. Given we're in 2.x -> 3.x migration phase, I tell a short story in which "most language designers" never thought of putting in a deliberate break point, a pit stop for correcting low level design flaws that are sure to be there (we all make mistakes), making some cool tweaks, but Guido is smarter than the average bear (cartoon allusion **). Plus we like making fun of Y2K (a "retro apocalypse"), Py3K or Python 3000 being a takeoff on that, also on Windows 2000 maybe. We can afford to get "mock apocalyptic" about all the breaking code, because we actually have no reason to panic. The older engines aren't going anywhere, we have time to take a relaxed not-crisis-driven approach for a change. Anyway there's history to tell, also about the VM based approach (managed code), versus pedal to the metal chip assembly code hot off the compiler, as that's our entry point for discussing Mono/.NET (CLR) and the Java class hierarchy and runtime, which are sort of like "core" and "standard library" all rolled into one (for those coming from CPython or just C itself). When it comes to core, standard library, 3rd party, I'm quick to point out we ourselves are 3rd party the moment we save that first .py file in /site-packages i.e. all additional code is in some sense 3rd party. The question of how the interpreter and source code co-exist is too convoluted to get into that much, but we don't always do it the same way. Most trivially, in shell mode we're real time interactive, whereas in running a script, we're walking away from REPL (read, evaluate, print, loop). GUI applications have their characteristic main loop event polling, and so on. I don't think I should hype Python Nation's PiPy as "the equivalent of CPAN" in the Republic of Perl as it's not, although the idea is similar. On the Java side, eggs are like jars. What I'm trying to do in my allotted 30-45 minutes is "speak geek" in a fluent enough way to give listeners, also watching projected content, a sense of what's what in this rather ephemeral realm of open source software (how come we get to look at the source is because it's open). This is useful for adults thinking about retraining in IT, not just for math faculties looking for new topics that integrate well with the sciences ala SciPy or whatever. Kirby ** http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEZJ_mLUNPc

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Re: [Edu-sig] Edu-sig Digest, Vol 62, Issue 15
by John Posner 15 Sep '08

15 Sep '08

> ... Presumably we could apply the same approach to teaching > elementary-school arithmetic algorithms, maze traversal algorithms, > and the like for One Laptop Per Child. I have suggested this to their > Education mailing list. Here's a video of a tool I wrote to help elementary-school kids learn carrying/borrowing in the addition/subtraction of whole numbers. http://showmedo.com/videos/video?name=2010000&fromSeriesID=201 To get this tool, and a similar one for adding/subtracting fractions, go to: http://www.geocities.com/jjphoogrp -John Posner

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Algorithms Animator Open Sourced
by DiPierro, Massimo 15 Sep '08

15 Sep '08

I open sourced this. In the hope it is useful to some of you. Algorithms Animator https://launchpad.net/algorithms-animator Python application that implements and animates interactively those algorithms that are normally covered in an undergraduate course on the topic. It includes Insertion Sort, Quicksort, Mergesort, AVL Tree Search/Insert/Rebalance, Depth First Search, Breadth First Search, Topological Sort, Prim, Kruskal, Dijkstra, LCS, Huffman-Fano, and more. It is extensible. All the API are exposed. It includes a ready-to-run Windows executable (bin/AlgorithmsAnimator.exe), some documentation and a short tutorial about running time analysis (doc/csc321notes.pdf). This program was originally designed in 2003 for teaching "Design and Analysis of Algorithms" at DePaul University. All the algorithms in the source code (src/csc321algorithms.py) are equivalent line-by-line to the pseudo-code in the MIT CLRS "Introduction to Algorithms" book. Massimo

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Reeborg's world!
by Andre Roberge 14 Sep '08

14 Sep '08

Hi everyone, You can see a more Python-like implementation of Steve Howell's Webster van Robot at http://reeborg.world.googlepages.com/reeborg.html. It is essentially a draft web-based version of rur-ple (for those that are familiar with it). The actual home page, where Steve is given credit is http://reeborg.world.googlepages.com/home This is very much work in progress (that I will try to update on the web ...), which will eventually be integrated in Crunchy. At this time, instructions are not included but "should be" somewhat intuitive. [just click at random ;-) ... alternatively, go to the home page, find the link to the images, which should help a bit.] As usual, comments and suggestions are welcome! André

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Re: [Edu-sig] Network Simulations using Python
by David MacQuigg 13 Sep '08

13 Sep '08

At 11:14 AM 9/10/2008 -0500, Andrew Harrington wrote: >Doing this in Python sounds good. keep us posted on the updates. I'll keep my updates at http://ece.arizona.edu/~edatools/ece578/Ethernet/ >I am most interested in a module to use with Cs0 or CS1 types to >illustrate network issues, not something a *user* would need more >than a few weeks of Python for. I can do some fairly sophisticated models with simple Python programs. Class definitions are essential, however, so it may take a little more Python than is covered in the first few weeks of CS1. Maybe there is some synergy here. The network models can help students learn Python by motivating the need to define your own classes. At 11:05 AM 9/10/2008 -0500, Michael Goldwasser wrote: > Thats a great start and I agree that it might be easier to develop > your own Python simulation versus using the existing simulators. I > don't teach our upper level networks course but have tried to do some > very simple networks materials as part of a "cs 0" breadth course and > again I run into the same problem in that I want a very basic network > simulation that demonstrates the basic idea of packet switching > without overwhelming beginning students. We're using Computer Networks by Peterson and Davie, and packet switching is Chapter 3, starting a week from now. Suggestions for simulation problems are welcome. I appreciate the earlier suggestion to do some network programming (using a network rather than simulating it), and I know Python is very good at this. There is not much in this text on programming. For CS0 you might want animations, rather than simulations. See http://net-seal.net They have one on packet switching. I've gone the next step with my Ethernet simulation (sim1.py), and encapsulated all the functionality into a few classes. This adds some complexity (sim2.py), but now you can easily change the variable to be swept, even re-use the objects in a different network configuration. One difficulty that I am running into is that many of our students haven't even heard of Python. They have had plenty of Java, however, so I've written an annotated version of sim1.py to explain the differences from Java (sim1PythonNotes.py). Michael's Appendix B is excellent on comparing Java and Python. I thought about just doing the whole thing in Java, but then we lose the most important advantage of Python as a network simulation toolkit - interactive development of the models. -- Dave >On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 10:43 AM, David MacQuigg <<mailto:macquigg@ece.arizona.edu>macquigg(a)ece.arizona.edu> wrote: >>I'm putting together some problems for students in ECE 578, Computer Networks. The simulator being used in the class is truly awful, one of these expensive commercial programs, dumbed down for academic use, but still loaded with the non-essential complexity typical of programs written for full-time professionals. >> >>It occurs to me that Python would be a much better tool for what we are doing. The objects in a network are easily modeled as Python objects, and students gain a much better understanding when they see what is inside the objects, rather than just picking them off a menu, and using them as black boxes. >> >>Take a look at <http://ece.arizona.edu/%7Eedatools/ece578/Ethernet/>http://ece.arizona.edu/~edatools/ece578/Ethernet/ The Python program is still in its early stages. Next step is to "refactor" it, making the main program a Network object, so we can run it in a loop. >> >>Comments and suggestions are welcome, especially for more clarity in the Python code. Python is still not used in any class at U of A, and this could be one of our shining examples to get it started.

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