Mailman 3 May 2018 - Edu-sig

Suggested metrics for measuring our success
by Jeff Elkner May 15, 2018

May 15, 2018

Dear Education Pythonistas, I'd like to suggest two useful metrics for measuring the effectiveness of our list: 1. Variety of posters. 2. Number of conversations. Our Community Code of Conduct commits us to conducting ourselves in a welcoming and respectful way, and what better measure of how well we are doing than the diversity of different folks who post on this list? If Edu-sig is about building and nurturing our python in education community, what better way to measure how well we are doing than by the number of posts that turn into conversational threads? I occasionally receive emails from teachers asking about good resources for teaching CS with Python. This year I am going to try asking them to join this mailing list and to post their question on it, and commit to providing the best response I can here. Jeff Elkner Let's work together to create a just and sustainable world!

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What do folks think of creating a #python-k12 channel on freenode?
by Jeff Elkner May 15, 2018

May 15, 2018

Dear edu-sig friends, We had an interesting discussion at the Education Summit today at Pycon about ways to better engage folks between Pycons. As a public school teacher, I have a particular interest in python in k12 institutions, and in addition to posting more often on this list, I am considering setting up an irc channel on freenode (#python-k12 ?) Would anyone else here have an interest in such a channel? Jeff Elkner Let's work together to create a just and sustainable world!

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Free Python teaching resources: Computer Science Teachers Association of Ireland
by Stephen Murphy May 14, 2018

May 14, 2018

Hello all, My name is Stephen Murphy. I am a teacher of science, biology, coding, digital media and computer science in Gaelcholaiste Mhuire AG in Cork City, Ireland. The Irish government has recently created coding, digital media and computer science subjects in Irish schools. The coding and digital media course have already started to junior classes, the senior computer science subject will come into effect next September. The national body charged with developing the curriculum and specification for the Computer Science subject has said that only Python and Java script may be used. In November 2017, I created the Computer Science Teachers' Association of Ireland (CSTAI). To date, we have over 400 members and 36 of the 40 pilot Leaving Certificate Computer Science schools have joined. We have a Google Drive with 100's of resources for coding, computer science, digital media and general computing courses. The material is suitable for both primary and secondary level. These resources can be accessed, downloaded and modified by our members for their class. We have an entire folder of Python resources (Notes, worksheets, videos, python scripts etc) on the Google Drive. I propose an exchange of Python teaching resources from the CSTAI to you and vice-versa. This will allow both sets of teachers to expand their teaching resource bank. If you are interested in this exchange, please respond to this email and we can work out the exchange. Best wishes, Stephen

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recent wheel spinning... (spatial geom)
by kirby urner May 13, 2018

May 13, 2018

Apologies in advance for my ramblings. Something here might be of interest to anonymous readers... Last night and today were all about dusting off old skills and using Python in a Jupyter Notebook to showcase renderings by the free raytracer POV-Ray ( povray.org). The topic is pure geometry, no fancy textures required. In the meantime I'm looking at both Rhino (proprietary) and Blender (open source), partly because C6XTY / Flextegrity wants to get itself into the hands of more software engineers and partly because Coding with Kids is looking at teaching more 2D / 3D graphics (partially covered in the current suite of tools, but room for growth). These are both CAD programs for doing 3D animations and renderings, both with Python APIs. I learned from my teaching job with kids that even Chromebooks have access to some kind of Blender in the cloud. Didn't know that until last week. This kid sounds like one of our students: https://youtu.be/JlydssSG5Iw Here's the Jupyter Notebook in question. The only dependency is qrays.py in the same Github repo [and of course povray if the goal is to do renderings]. https://github.com/4dsolutions/Python5/blob/master/Generating%20the%20FCC.i… Zooming out: what I think might interest high schoolers, just learning about XYZ, spherical coordinates and so on, is some exposure to these arcane alien esoteric "quadray coordinates" that use 4-tuples instead of 3-tuples to map points in space (no negative numbers required). I've got lots of material on 'em but don't claim credit for inventing them (more a popularizer, implemented 'em in Python and Clojure, Tom Ace in C++). http://mathforum.org/library/view/6236.html What's appealing is they're conceptually accessible, not hard to grok, yet there's so much room for original research. Clearly four spokes divide space into four quadrants and any point is reachable by adding up to three (stretched or shrunk -- but not reversed) per the usual vector scaling and addition operations. The centers of all balls in what we call the FCC or CCP packing (core in crystallography), starting with a nuclear sphere then 1, 12, 42, 92... balls packing outward in shells (see OEIS [1]) may be given all-integer 4-tuple coordinates using qrays. Example (these are the 12 ball centers around a nuclear center, at the corners of a cuboctahedron with origin at (0,0,0,0) (note: ivm_vector is same thing as qray, of namedtuple type in collections library). {ivm_vector(a=0, b=1, c=1, d=2), ivm_vector(a=1, b=2, c=0, d=1), ivm_vector(a=0, b=1, c=2, d=1), ivm_vector(a=0, b=2, c=1, d=1), ivm_vector(a=2, b=1, c=0, d=1), ivm_vector(a=1, b=2, c=1, d=0), ivm_vector(a=1, b=1, c=2, d=0), ivm_vector(a=2, b=1, c=1, d=0), ivm_vector(a=1, b=0, c=2, d=1), ivm_vector(a=2, b=0, c=1, d=1), ivm_vector(a=1, b=0, c=1, d=2), ivm_vector(a=1, b=1, c=0, d=2)} Today I realized that to add Qrays to a set, they'd need to be (a) hashable and (b) usable with == i.e. __eq__ would need to have meaning. Without __eq__, every instance was being seen as unique. That add to the set OK, but dupes were not thrown out. They'd hash, but not on the 4-tuple content, what __eq__ now provides. Here's that code fragment: def __eq__(self, other): return self.coords == other.coords def __hash__(self): return hash(self.coords) Most recent qrays (there's an ordinary XYZ vector type too -- and the means to go back and forth): https://github.com/4dsolutions/Python5/blob/master/qrays.py (I keep updating this, like I notice I need to update the comments to say I updated the file just today) The algorithm for getting successive layers of balls (1, 12, 42, 92...) is to add all 12 balls around every ball in shell N, but then discard (simply by using the set object for storage) all those balls already in shell N or shell N-1, generating only balls in shell N+1. nucleus = {qrays.Qvector((0,0,0,0))} layer1 = tuple(map(qrays.Qvector, ((0, 1, 1, 2), (1, 0, 1, 2), (2, 0, 1, 1), (0, 2, 1, 1), (0, 1, 2, 1), (1, 2, 1, 0), (1, 1, 2, 0), (2, 1, 1, 0), (1, 0, 2, 1), (1, 2, 0, 1), (2, 1, 0, 1), (1, 1, 0, 2)))) def next_layer(curr_layer, prev_layer): next_layer = set() for qv in curr_layer: for bv in layer1: v_sum = qv + bv if (not v_sum in curr_layer and not v_sum in prev_layer): next_layer.add(v_sum) return next_layer nl = next_layer(nucleus, nucleus) # 1-freq nnl = next_layer(nl, nucleus) # 2-freq nnnl = next_layer(nnl, nl) # 3-freq print("Number of balls in successive layers:") print(len(nl)) print(len(nnl)) print(len(nnnl)) If you click on the Notebook you'll see what I mean by "shells". More here: https://github.com/4dsolutions/Python5/blob/master/STEM%20Mathematics.ipynb Anyway, quadrays or "caltrop coordinates" are pretty freaky and I think help XYZers better appreciate what the orthodoxy is. When you've seen something alien, you better appreciate the status quo. I took C6XTY out to Saturday Academy on the campus of University of Portland [2], to see Rhino and Jupyter Notebooks running on Windows7. Jupyter Notebooks at least is something to have on your resume if thinking about college. It's about working with way more than just Python. I think I posted those recent articles already. Kirby [1] http://oeis.org/A005901 (my name under links, still trying to make it viral) [2] C6XTY @ sa: this Thursday: https://flic.kr/p/HnGeut (sa: is where I've taught Martian Math before) http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/martianmath/toc.html http://wikieducator.org/Martian_Math

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Re: [Edu-sig] Edu-sig Digest, Vol 177, Issue 3
by Chalmer Lowe May 13, 2018

May 13, 2018

Good call, Jeff! Chalmer Lowe, MS President, Dark Art of Coding http://darkartofcoding.com/ Chairman, Python Education Summit https://us.pycon.org/2015/events/edusummit/ On Sat, May 12, 2018 at 12:00 PM, <edu-sig-request(a)python.org> wrote: > Send Edu-sig mailing list submissions to > edu-sig(a)python.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > edu-sig-request(a)python.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > edu-sig-owner(a)python.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Edu-sig digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. Suggested metrics for measuring our success (Jeff Elkner) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Sat, 12 May 2018 11:28:49 -0400 > From: Jeff Elkner <jeff(a)elkner.net> > To: "edu-sig(a)python.org" <edu-sig(a)python.org> > Subject: [Edu-sig] Suggested metrics for measuring our success > Message-ID: > <kAsrEtymJQFOjU9wfF3MYFtITIxeyWfc1sPekUILz8EGEG1S1XrS3HHicOy2 > z6TfMGs4JAbgWLCh2lHpQGYmP48866Vz0tHZM87WwhBcSMs=(a)elkner.net> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Dear Education Pythonistas, > > I'd like to suggest two useful metrics for measuring the effectiveness of > our list: > 1. Variety of posters. > 2. Number of conversations. > > Our Community Code of Conduct commits us to conducting ourselves in a > welcoming and respectful way, and what better measure of how well we are > doing than the diversity of different folks who post on this list? > > If Edu-sig is about building and nurturing our python in education > community, what better way to measure how well we are doing than by the > number of posts that turn into conversational threads? > > I occasionally receive emails from teachers asking about good resources > for teaching CS with Python. This year I am going to try asking them to > join this mailing list and to post their question on it, and commit to > providing the best response I can here. > > Jeff Elkner > > Let's work together to create a just and sustainable world! >

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Re: [Edu-sig] Edu-sig Digest, Vol 177, Issue 1
by Chalmer Lowe May 13, 2018

May 13, 2018

at jeff elkner: 0) saw your brother today. woot. 1) re: freenode... setting IRC to reach a public teacher audience feels like one extra layer of tech/learning curve that they have overcome to get to the content. my two cents. Chalmer Lowe, MS President, Dark Art of Coding http://darkartofcoding.com/ Chairman, Python Education Summit https://us.pycon.org/2015/events/edusummit/ On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 12:00 PM, <edu-sig-request(a)python.org> wrote: > Send Edu-sig mailing list submissions to > edu-sig(a)python.org > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to > edu-sig-request(a)python.org > > You can reach the person managing the list at > edu-sig-owner(a)python.org > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific > than "Re: Contents of Edu-sig digest..." > > > Today's Topics: > > 1. What do folks think of creating a #python-k12 channel on > freenode? (Jeff Elkner) > 2. Re: What do folks think of creating a #python-k12 channel on > freenode? (A Jorge Garcia) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Message: 1 > Date: Thu, 10 May 2018 17:15:28 -0400 > From: Jeff Elkner <jeff(a)elkner.net> > To: "edu-sig(a)python.org" <edu-sig(a)python.org> > Subject: [Edu-sig] What do folks think of creating a #python-k12 > channel on freenode? > Message-ID: > <VZIaifBvT3x43c5hYiGYuuBbco2UUmLN6mSTAcaJvyV50_ > KvaE9i64p83woqKoK5HY4A0zqNzpiolNsAxlMugEqQzt8I8C45aoT9XFpekS4=(a)elkner.net> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" > > Dear edu-sig friends, > > We had an interesting discussion at the Education Summit today at > Pycon about ways to better engage folks between Pycons. > > As a public school teacher, I have a particular interest in python in > k12 institutions, and in addition to posting more often on this list, > I am considering setting up an irc channel on freenode (#python-k12 ?) > > Would anyone else here have an interest in such a channel? > > Jeff Elkner > > Let's work together to create a just and sustainable world! >

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