kirby urner wrote:
The idea of rich data structures was to take advantage of the Internet by providing students with more meaningful precoded data through which to plow.
Examples:
* all the bones in the body as a tree structure (with some fancy networking among skull bones)
* GIS info (I posted cities.xml from Winterhaven)
* the eight planets of our solar system, plus Pluto and Iris (the latter owned by CBS (smile)).
The idea of a rich data stream anticipates Python 3's strong powers around data bitting (new bit type), which'll make OO dissection of IPv6 packets (legacy IPv4 packets) a cinch.
Kirby, I've seen your posts re building up a reusable set of data for teaching before, and I think it is a good idea. Where are you collecting and making this information available? It seems like a single project under source control would allow others to utilize and contribute to such a stockpile, piece by piece. -Jeff