On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 12:24 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 08:05, Jeff Elkner <jeff@elkner.net> wrote:
Hi Edward,
The book is licensed under the GNU/FDL and is available here:
Excellent. Thank you.
I'm very familiar with Turtle Art, since a college intern working with me last Summer did a Sugar to Gnome port of it, which in now in the debian repositories:
http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=turtleart
This Summer we will work to get that into Fedora.
I should talk to someone about getting it into Ubuntu, to add to Logo, kturtleart, and the turtle art module in Etoys. ^_^
It is already in Ubuntu, Edward, by way of Debian...
While as a classroom teacher I'm a huge fan of turtle art, Python's own turtle module is the tool of choice for my current intro college leve textbook project, since it runs on all major platforms and is part of the Python standard library.
I am planning a multi-year grade school sequence to introduce CS ideas using TA, with a transition from TA to Python by way of Python blocks in TA. I will take a look at your work, and see whether it makes sense to treat it as a followup to mine, or rather to design mine to lead into yours.
Among the topics I intend to emphasize are Church's Thesis, Gödel recursive functions, parse trees, stack programming (and hence RPN), language interpretation, and building a Turing Machine in pure TA.
Awesome! I can't wait to see what you come up with. jeff
Thanks!
jeff elkner open book project http://openbookproject.net
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 16:59, Jeff Elkner <jeff@elkner.net> wrote:
Hi All,
I'm working on an introductory CS book using Python with the turtle module,
Under what license?
Can we talk about using Turtle Art in Sugar as a starting point? it can call Python functions assigned to blocks, providing an easy transition from pure TA to pure Python. We have support for various other CS topics on TA blocks, including stack operations. I am planning to write a Turing machine in TA, using colored dots as cells on the tape and instructions in the transition table.
but I'm finding the inability of turtle.Screen() to take screen size arguments to be a real pain. The screen size appears to depend on the screen size of the host environment, which means standardizing screen shots for the book becomes impossible.
Any thoughts on this issue? It would be a huge help in promoting Python's use in education if we could make use of such a potentially fine module as the turtle module, but I'm finding it very difficult to write curriculum materials that use it since students don't have control over the turtle's screen in any easy to use way.
Thanks!
jeff elkner open book project http://openbookproject.net _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks
-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks