Mailman 3 August 2011 - Edu-sig

xturtle online via processing.js !?
by Jurgis Pralgauskis 27 Sep '12

27 Sep '12

Hi, I am struggling around with interactive online py tutorials with https://launchpad.net/projects/intro-to-code (ith might become securely sandboxed soon, as pypy made it possible http://blog.sandbox.lt/en/WSGI%20and%20PyPy%20sandbox :) but one more thing is I'd like to let access xturtle functionality online - one possible way could be triggering tkinter to save its canvas to ps, and then convert them with imagemagic and show via web (animated gif or static) - but if pyjamas can render GUI for js (http://www.google.lt/search?&q=pyjamas+python ), mayby there is a way to **translate turtle commands to processing.js analogues** http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs/ would it be difficult -- how do you think? -- Jurgis Pralgauskis tel: 8-616 77613; jabber: jurgis(a)akl.lt; skype: dz0rdzas; Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;) http://sagemath.visiems.lt

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OO and story problems
by kirby urner 29 Mar '12

29 Mar '12

I've been haunting the math-teach list, as usual, suggesting we take a page from AP computer science and build our math around an interlinked, themed, consistent set of story problems -- rather than making these "meaningless" (deliberately). The opponents in this debate bring up the specter of political manipulation, propaganda, tainted "pure math" with someone's good ideas about applications. My approach to math teaching, as readers here know (some of 'em), is to bake OO into the matrix pretty early, meaning the idea of "math objects" (vectors, polyhedrons, rational numbers) connects to our Pythonic notion of types. Here's some background reading for any wanting to sample the more detailed nuances of this thread (on-going, and for over a decade for sure). http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2289577&tstart=0 (most posters long time veterans of this list, with carved out positions) I also take it a step further in that the story problems under consideration often have a strong "off your duff" component, in that your mathematical reasoning translates into physical expenditure of energy. Yes, sounds a lot like summer camp (the "self quantification movement" also syncs up). http://fastwonderblog.com/2011/07/30/crunching-the-numbers-open-source-comm… http://hashtags.foxepractice.com/healthcare-hashtag-analytics.php?hashtag=Q… http://www.4dsolutions.net/presentations/urnermindstorm.pdf Kirby

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re Python's "batteries included" meme
by kirby urner 09 Oct '11

09 Oct '11

As I watch students struggle with the: if __name__ == "__main__": concept (where to put it, what it does), it occurs to me we could be doing more to leverage the already well-worn "batteries included." What's different about Python? The rich libraries it comes with, including a cross-platform GUI IDE. That's one meaning of "batteries included". But in another sense we could speak of the generic module as a "battery" with the "if run top-level" logic having to do with battery *testing*. ==== python module ==== [ BATTERIES ] (functions, classes, global-to-module names...) if __name__ == "__main__": [ BATTERY TESTERS ] ==================== That changes the meaning a little more, to where each Python module is like "a battery pack" with its own set of "testers". One thing we do with battery packs is we "import" (promote) their internals within a top-level namespace that starts off in some other (alien) module. Another thing we do with battery packs is run them top-level namespaces on their own, perhaps depending on imports (outsourced resources). I'm not suggesting harping on this too much, just another slide that goes by, but a fun mnemonic, and reinforcing of an already approved / useful design pattern (see my previous post in this edu-sig archive for an example of this self-testing style, relying on doctest for services). Kirby

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Re: [Edu-sig] Inexpensive robot teaching platforms
by Andy Judkis 21 Sep '11

21 Sep '11

Here's another possibility, 100 bucks, programmable in Jython along with several other languages: http://www.finchrobot.com/ Temp sensor, accelerometer, two IR sensors, two photodetectors. No batteries, it's powered off it's 15 foot USB cable, not sure if that's a bug or a feature. I haven't actually seen or used one. Cheers, Andy

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Announcement: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist -- Interactive Edition
by Brad Miller 04 Sep '11

04 Sep '11

Hello, As part of my Sabbatical this past year I've been working on a new edition of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (by Elkner et. al) with my colleague David Ranum. The idea behind this new edition is to make it interactive, to encourage students to learn by doing and to explore. The three main features we've added to previous editions are: Videos: Each section has (or will have) a 5-10 minute screencast explaining the written concepts verbally. Interactive Python interpreter. Using Skulpt -- an open source javascript implementation of Python. Codelens code visualizer -- Based on the Online Python Tutor by Philip Guo this element allows students to step forward and backward through the code and to see the values of variables To make it easy to add these features I wrote 3 new sphinx directives, so adding the interactive code features is not onerous. When we finish our last pass through the book, we'll make all the code available on bitbucket. We'll be using this book in our introductory course this fall at Luther, and adding more videos as we move through the semester. You can take a look at our work here: http://thinkcspy.appspot.com You'll need a gmail account to access the book. You'll also need a modern browser that supports html5, the interactive features rely heavily on Javascript and the canvas element. (Safari, Firefox 6, Chrome) The reason is that the interactive code allows you to save your changes and reload them again later. I've added an administrative back-end to the book so that we can have students do homework right in the browser. I'd love to hear your feedback and ideas for other interactive features. Brad -- Brad Miller Associate Professor, Computer Science Luther College

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PyTexas
by Medina, Pat 30 Aug '11

30 Aug '11

For those in Texas who may be interested, PyTexas 2011, the fourth annual free Python programming conference for Texas and the surrounding region, will take place Saturday September 10 and Sunday September 11, 2011 at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. Please refer to www.pytexas.org<http://www.pytexas.org/>/2011 for more information.

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Yet another online Python...
by kirby urner 30 Aug '11

30 Aug '11

Just alerted to this one by the chairman: http://pythonfiddle.com/ Still checking it out. Kirby

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Wiki-to-Speech at Kiwi PyCon
by John Graves 29 Aug '11

29 Aug '11

Just returned from a weekend at Kiwi PyCon http://nz.pycon.org/2011/jan/23/kiwi-pycon-2011-wellington-27-28-august-te-… where we had some great talks. This was my lightning talk about Wiki-to-Speech (16 slides, includes computer generated voice overs): http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12838403/20110822/pycon2011.htm I'm working now to make as many other talks as possible available as Wiki-to-Speech presentations. For example, here is a Wiki-to-Speech version of Saturday's keynote by Jeff Rush - The magic of metaprogramming http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12838403/20110827/metaprogramming.htm How the Wiki-to-Speech version was made: ---------------------------------------- The notes for Jeff's talk were captured on an Etherpad: http://ietherpad.com/kiwipycon2011-jeff-rush as were notes from half (one track) of the rest of the conference http://ietherpad.com/kiwipycon2011 Jeff provided his slides as a directory of S5 files. Here is the S5 tool: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ I took screen shots of those slides and pasted them into an Open Office Impress presentation http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12838403/20110827/metaprogramming.odp putting the text from my Etherpad notes in the speaker notes for each slide. The slide images and .odp file were then processed by the Wiki-to-Speech from ODP utility (odp2wts.py) available from http://wikitospeech.org (compiled for Mac and Windows) http://openallureds.org (source) which generated the slide voice overs using text-to-speech and wrapped the slide images and resulting .mp3 and .ogg files in HTML with a bit of navigation. One great suggestion from Francois Marier http://www.slideshare.net/fmarier was to take the generated output one step further, using the slide images and computer generated text-to-speech to produce a video by using ffmpeg. This is now an enhancement request on the open source Wiki-to-Speech project http://code.google.com/p/open-allure-ds/issues/detail?id=12 if anyone is interested in helping out. How would you like to be able to create slides, add what you want said to the speaker notes and have the presentation output as a video with computer generated voice overs? John Graves PhD Student Auckland University of Technology New Zealand john.graves(a)aut.ac.nz http://bit.ly/JohnGravesLinkedIn (+64) 021 213 8367 (mobile)

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Re: [Edu-sig] Announcement: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist -- Interactive Edition
by Laura Creighton 27 Aug '11

27 Aug '11

Wow Brad, this is really cool. Have you given any thought to making this work with Google Translate so that people whose native language is not English can just use the thing? Laura

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Re: [Edu-sig] Announcement: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist -- Interactive Edition
by Phil Wagner 27 Aug '11

27 Aug '11

Wow Brad, I'm so glad you are keeping up this project. It was the tutorial that got me started on Python, what I provide to all of my students, and my top recommendation on my blog. To have additional resources and support for teachers will be wonderful. Thank you so much. Looking through this, makes me feel like a new standard has been set for online textbooks! As far as feedback, is it possible that the video could be in widescreen? I'm not sure how it was recorded but it squishes everything in. The code boxes are brilliant, but I ran an infinite while loop in one and it froze up the page. Not a big deal in Chrome since each window runs independently of each other and I just closed it. I could see this happening 20 seconds into a course. Could be a feature not a bug and I am certainly not advocating for "locking it down" but thought I would mention it. Thanks again! Your resources are making a huge impact and opening doors for people who might not otherwise have discovered the joys of programming. -- www.brokenairplane.com (Ed-Tech Blog, Tutorials, and Resources) Connect with me on: Twitter <https://twitter.com/brokenairplane>, LinkedIn<http://www.linkedin.com/in/philhwagner>, and Google+ <http://gplus.to/brokenairplane>

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