I think dragging them through a non-trivial project start-to-finish in one intro lesson can be effective at reaching students because it shows them everything (which is not so much) that lies between them and a completed application/product, thereby giving them hope and not scaring them that it's too much of a mountain ahead ...

On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:04 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
Another plotting exercise: MathClock / MathCircle

With X, Y coordinates,
- Draw a circle
- Draw a circle around the origin
- Label degrees (360; Babylonian base 12)
- Label fractional radians
- Label 12 hours
- Label the 60 minutes
- Draw clock hands

And then do the same with radial coordinates

... Number representations: change of base; Columns in e.g. Pandas; Trigonometry: Sin, Cos

On Sunday, June 23, 2019, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:


On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kirby,

I think kids should write their own plotting routines to graph their functions starting anywhere 3rd-7th grade. 

In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP,  ... all kinds of stuff.

What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
 
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.

What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks?

- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube
- Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective)
- Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
 

-Charlie

On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:

Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).

This year:
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb

That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.

Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right?  Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).

Kirby

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