On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Jurgis Pralgauskis <jurgis.pralgauskis@gmail.com> wrote:
maybe smb knows of similar initiatives ?
googling around found http://www.python-visual-sandbox.de/
Excellent set of visualizations, although I bailed just now on recursive Fibonaccis, a reflex as that's so not the right way to do it (but hey, the author is teaching recursion, so my problem not his). "I'll be back" (Gov. of California voice). I especially liked the one about lists and pointers, as it hearkens back to recent long threads right here on edu-sig about how to best visualize what's happening in: s = [1] t = [s, s, s] for ele in t: ele[0] += 1
print(t) [[4], [4], [4]]
(one of the examples, updated to Py3). That you get to watch more than one visualization and then "vote" is so focus group. The more Pythonic visualizations seem to come later (numbers too are objects, a = 1, then a = 2 is repointing name 'a', b = a means another name for the same object... Probably the whole notion of reference counting and garbage collection is a good place to dive into the system language implementation when the time comes? Copying is "discouraged" in Python because of the "heavyweight objects" and "lightweight names" model: i.e. could easily be very expensive to copy (and why did you need two of the same thing in the first place?), memory-wise, so "a = b" doesn't mean that, and adding lots of names is very low overhead. In my Saturday Academy class, a typical object is "a bulldozer" or "a train" in a somewhat literal sense, in that I'm having them imagining puppeting their sandbox toys via some AJAXy eyecandy or whatever (a mental exercise), except now they're not just sandbox toys anymore, but the real deal. Oh, and the regular expressions thing (first one) -- fantastic. Michael Weigend is a talented artist. I thank you for sharing this link, will be shopping it around to my teachers. Kirby