On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 7:23 AM, Daniel Ajoy <da.ajoy@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, 20 Dec 2009 06:00:01 -0500, <edu-sig-request@python.org> wrote:
hello, i will start introductory CS courses for middle school students (age 10 -13); i will mainly make use of logo-like languages and approaches, Turtle Art among a couple of others; i'd like to ask if you know which the most widespread approaches to CS teaching are today for young students, or if someone has collected on the web a simple classification among different approaches, showing similarities and differences; i'd like to let students taste something new and then report back to you the result of the courses
In my country some teachers still go through
Flowcharts pseudocode then actual programming: using visualfox, pascal, or visual basic
Wow, visualfox. That's another language I've used plenty. Wish I could find another gig for that here in Portland -- maybe I will. Is visualfox still used commercially a lot? I hear it's big in Prague -- but that was some years ago. Back to Python, I've been helping this polytech student in Indonesia with his Monte Carlo integration. There's a simple Mathematica implementation I'm following, but I think my error term calc is screwed up. If anyone here has the time to give me some pointers... help me spread Python user base in Indonesia! CS teachers probably do this in their sleep, or for breakfast [some other idiom]. This could be another area where our DM track (digital math track) segues to calculus (always looking for those segues). http://math.fullerton.edu/mathews/n2003/MonteCarloMod.html from random import randint import math def getpoints(n, a, b): interval = b-a # assume a <= b points = [] # empty list for i in range(n): r = randint(0,100) # some percent point = a + (interval * .01 * r) # a plus some percent of interval points.append(point) return points def g(x): """ the function to evaluate for its definite integral over an interval """ # return x * x # or x ** 2 return math.sqrt(x) def average(f, somepoints): n = len(somepoints) # how many points thesum = sum( [f(x) for x in somepoints]) return thesum/n def geterror(f, guess, somepoints, a, b, n): """ I have some questions about this """ thesum = (1.0/n) * sum( [f(x) * f(x) for x in somepoints]) # right? return (b-a) * math.sqrt(abs(thesum - guess*guess) / n) def montecarlo(f, n, a, b): thepoints = getpoints(n, a, b) theaverage = average(f, thepoints) approx = (b - a) * theaverage error = geterror(f, approx, thepoints, a,b, n) return (approx, error) def tests(): print getpoints(10, 1, 4) print getpoints(10, 0, 10) print average(g, getpoints(10, 0, 4)) print montecarlo(g, 100, 0, 4) if __name__ == "__main__": tests() Kirby --
from mars import math http://www.wikieducator.org/Digital_Math