A nice little example of code with interactive explanations. Actionscript in flash, but same technique coudl be ysed for Python etc. http://www.jurjans.lv/flash/shape.html - Jason
hmm.. just in case it is not obvious, this is what I wanted to bring to your attention... - Click on 'tutorials' - Then roll the mouse over the code sections - Right hand pane changes to illustrate geometrically what the code is doing or solving. - The main "with" phrase pop-up includes a small sublink "it can be calculated" in red type. - Rollover over that to see an additional illustration. I think there is a good idea here, but the implementation is crude/minimal... Problems: -The type is far too small, and needs intuitive zoom method to fix that. - How to print ? ..what a shame :-( Both of these can be easily addressed in Flash, especially now since the latest version handles mousewheel events. [Great for scrolling and zooming.] Printing is just a little more work for the developer, but Flash offers good control of print. However Without implementing it at all, if you try to print this page now from your web browser you'll get a disappointing blank where the swf file is embedded. Wishlist: I'd like to see 2-way interactivity, where the geometric illustrations are active so one can select parts of them ala Geometer. Where relevant grabbing the parts of the drawing could feedback dynamically to highlight the code and/or description. A technique used in the famous Edu-TV series "The Mechanical Universe" explaining off Kepler's equations and Newton's Laws of Motion For me this flash example hints at a healthy bridge between Mathematica Notebooks, and interactive visual Python type programming. One wants the ability and encouragement to dive in hands-on and explore code and results "live", but also to have a teacher/programmers metaview - an durable explanation which marries the back-of-napkin sketch algorthmic thinking with the reality of working code. One difficulty for learning programming is that key sections of code are very powerful and important - the core algorithms but you can't easily see or discuss them until the whole program is often constructed. Here then is a way to provide that overview while exploring sections. I can imagine a cool tagging system to facilitate authoring meta data illustrations. Authors could tag sections of their code with some minimal dictionary pair [id, name]. Then a subsequent authoring/presentation tool could be used to add more complete metadata, descriptions, illustrations etc. Leo provides one good structure for this. http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html Leo helps one break up code to suit context and readability, without sacrificing formal language requirements. It's 100% XML-based so meta-anything is implicit. And Leo embraces many kinds of language, code, text, lists, links etc. Written in Python, it has an open plug-in architecture. Existing Python projects can be imported into Leo easily and then additional non-Python materials added. Finally one needs a dynamic presentation tool. Flash offers one obvious platform, but there others. Not sure where PythonCard fits into this dream. happy new year all - Jason
if you try to print this page now from your web browser you'll get a disappointing blank where the swf file is embedded.
oops.. My mistake. Just experimented with "Print Preview" The page can print, and even seems to capture the active selection. That's nice - but alas very distorted and could waste a *lot* of ink. :-( - Jason
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Jason Cunliffe
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Jason Cunliffe