Thanks to all of you that gave me feedback; this is very useful. A new version of Crunchy will soon be out - I "only" have to document the changes in the Crunchy tutorial. This new version will include two new types of interpreters as option, one based on Michael Tobis's suggestion from a few weeks ago, the other based on John Posner's suggestion. My over-optimistic goal is to have version 1.0 released early in September - for use in the next school year by interested parties. I understand that some students working for Jeff Elkner have been adapting "How to think like a computer scientist" as well as the livewires modules so that they would be best making use of Crunchy. Stay tuned... Cheers, André On 8/22/07, Dethe Elza <delza@livingcode.org> wrote:
Not a school, but some data points for you in this world where ultra-mobile computers (cell phones, PDAs, etc) may be out-pacing the growth of desktops and faux-desktop laptops:
Nokia N800 web appliance (my travel computer, together with a fold-up bluetooth keyboard it weighs about a pound, a third of that without the keyboard): 800 x 480 resolution. Runs PyGame nicely, has Python 2.5 as an optional install, Linux-based.
The OLPC XO is 1200 x 900 (and more amazingly, 200 DPI) and also runs PyGame, so my N800 serves as a development platform for the XO until I can get my hands on the real thing.
Right now I'm working on a Scratch-like environment for kids built on top of PyGame. My son just got an extremely powerful computer for his 7th birthday: a Nintendo DS (two screens, one touch-sensitive). Every game he plays, he sits down to sketch out how he would write it in Scratch, complete with wireframes, event handling, etc. Scratch has been an amazing force in our house. Right now he and his sister (who also has a DS) are playing games against each other wirelessly, without any support infrastructure (The DS creates its own wireless network). This is their world, they expect everything to be able to be programmable, connectable, hackable (they read my copies of Make magazine before I do and plan out their hardware projects: we'll be building an MP3 player when we get back from vacation).
Hope all of you are well. Greetings from Sofia, Bulgaria.
--Dethe _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig