New articles on Medium.... (not all by me :-D)
Useful summary of on-line Python 3 tutorials, starting with the one in docs.python.org itself: https://medium.com/@lockpaddy/10-resources-to-learn-python-3-9a735db7aff9#.m... Is it just me or am I sensing a strong pull towards Python 3, away from 2.x? My meditation, also on Medium, published today, is a more generic meditation on code schools. https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/is-code-school-the-new-high-school-30a8874170... I mention Python quite a bit, in my appraisal of the looming digital divide and how to bridge it. I've invited more math teachers to comment as what I write concerns them: http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2845880 None of these are new themes on edu-sig. If you check my other Medium writings, you'll find a lot more (also blogs). Kirby
Hi Kirby, just read your article on Medium. Interesting thoughts, as always. I read something the other day which pointed out that in Chinese high school calculators are not allowed … possibly ever? It seems like a no-brainer to me to eliminate calculators from the K-12 system entirely, but apparently not to the powers-that-be. I’ve been in several math classrooms lately while subbing and the button sequences required to do simple things are just ridiculous, far-outweighing any emphasis on what one is doing via such sequences. One question about code schools that I have is: Are their certificates recognized? I hate the thought of all the middle-man certification industry being imposed upon something good like PDX Code Guild, but it seems like the first potential issue that would come-up, i.e. how transferable and recognized is that accomplishment? I’m curious because I’d like to start one here in New Mexico, but I can already hear the skeptics and nay-sayers that I’ve heard so many times before … and I can see an efficient model getting bloated with collaborations with corporations which “certify” and “accredit” etc etc. The last couple months have been interesting for me, as an education software enthusiast substitute-teaching in the k-12 system. Many teachers purchase their own software and set of licenses because the school system won’t. Many teachers also pull-up free, online materials during class, and some of those are spewing flat-out incorrect information. For example, I was visiting a middle-school science class doing a “block” on renewable energy and the class began with a visit to a website (projected on the screen) in which the site defined torque as “a special kind of energy” and proceeded to build upon that (incorrect) definition over the rest of the “lesson”, culminating in questions that couldn’t be answered or were at-odds with the initial definitions provided. Another quick story: about 10 yrs ago my daughter was in middle school in the same public school system as I’m now teaching in. One day she told me that the sky was blue because the sunlight reflected off the ocean(!!!). Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, when I was covering science class at a different school (now 10 years later) and talking about Sun-Earth interaction and so forth. Out of curiosity I asked the class if they knew why the sky was blue? Everyone knew! It was because the sun reflects off the ocean! I asked other classes that day and got the same damn answer from each class. What do you call that? “Institutionalized mis-information”? Where is it coming from? These things are set in their minds by the power of the first impression or first encounter, in this case. This is just one example, and not the only one. This does not bode well for the future of our country. One last reflection: I’m now a long-term sub as a music teacher in the same elementary school that both my children attended. Irrelevant except that I love the school. I’ve never taught music and I’ve got up to nine classes per day with 20–25 kids per class. That’s 200 students from k-5 every day. I am regularly scrambling for cool things to do in class. I developed a music bingo game <https://github.com/ccosse/MusicBingo> (original to me but not the first) in the first weeks. That went-over very well and I’ve been thinking of ways to extend and improve upon it. I borrowed an iPad from the school and I’ve got a Raspberry-Pi3 setup as a server already. I’m thinking that a good software activity would be to have the kids sitting in a circle with their iPads and a bingo screen served by the R-Pi in the middle of the circle (or wherever). In other words, digital music bingo, whereas it’s currently just printed paper sheets and drawing notes etc from a hat. This type of setup appeals to me software-wise, as it would remain an interactive group activity and still make use of technology. The tech is right there in-their-face, still, but it might as well be a physical game board made of card stock. The benefit is that the teacher wouldn’t have to run around checking all the answers, and things like that. Code schools. Once again, it’s gonna come down to the teachers at the code school. God help us! On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 12:53 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Useful summary of on-line Python 3 tutorials, starting with the one in docs.python.org itself:
https://medium.com/@lockpaddy/10-resources-to-learn-python- 3-9a735db7aff9#.mabvr7g8l
Is it just me or am I sensing a strong pull towards Python 3, away from 2.x?
My meditation, also on Medium, published today, is a more generic meditation on code schools.
https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/is-code-school-the- new-high-school-30a8874170b
I mention Python quite a bit, in my appraisal of the looming digital divide and how to bridge it.
I've invited more math teachers to comment as what I write concerns them:
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2845880
None of these are new themes on edu-sig.
If you check my other Medium writings, you'll find a lot more (also blogs).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-cosse> | E-Learning <http://www.asymptopia.org>
PS -- in my last months of k-12 teaching the best (commercial) software i've seen is "kahoot". It surely influenced my idea about a R-Pi Bingo Server ... this would be a great thing to reproduce as an Edu-FLS (FreeLibreSoftware) platform, IMO. On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 8:45 AM, Charles <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kirby, just read your article on Medium. Interesting thoughts, as always. I read something the other day which pointed out that in Chinese high school calculators are not allowed … possibly ever? It seems like a no-brainer to me to eliminate calculators from the K-12 system entirely, but apparently not to the powers-that-be. I’ve been in several math classrooms lately while subbing and the button sequences required to do simple things are just ridiculous, far-outweighing any emphasis on what one is doing via such sequences.
One question about code schools that I have is: Are their certificates recognized? I hate the thought of all the middle-man certification industry being imposed upon something good like PDX Code Guild, but it seems like the first potential issue that would come-up, i.e. how transferable and recognized is that accomplishment? I’m curious because I’d like to start one here in New Mexico, but I can already hear the skeptics and nay-sayers that I’ve heard so many times before … and I can see an efficient model getting bloated with collaborations with corporations which “certify” and “accredit” etc etc.
The last couple months have been interesting for me, as an education software enthusiast substitute-teaching in the k-12 system. Many teachers purchase their own software and set of licenses because the school system won’t. Many teachers also pull-up free, online materials during class, and some of those are spewing flat-out incorrect information. For example, I was visiting a middle-school science class doing a “block” on renewable energy and the class began with a visit to a website (projected on the screen) in which the site defined torque as “a special kind of energy” and proceeded to build upon that (incorrect) definition over the rest of the “lesson”, culminating in questions that couldn’t be answered or were at-odds with the initial definitions provided.
Another quick story: about 10 yrs ago my daughter was in middle school in the same public school system as I’m now teaching in. One day she told me that the sky was blue because the sunlight reflected off the ocean(!!!). Fast forward to a couple weeks ago, when I was covering science class at a different school (now 10 years later) and talking about Sun-Earth interaction and so forth. Out of curiosity I asked the class if they knew why the sky was blue? Everyone knew! It was because the sun reflects off the ocean! I asked other classes that day and got the same damn answer from each class. What do you call that? “Institutionalized mis-information”? Where is it coming from? These things are set in their minds by the power of the first impression or first encounter, in this case. This is just one example, and not the only one. This does not bode well for the future of our country.
One last reflection: I’m now a long-term sub as a music teacher in the same elementary school that both my children attended. Irrelevant except that I love the school. I’ve never taught music and I’ve got up to nine classes per day with 20–25 kids per class. That’s 200 students from k-5 every day. I am regularly scrambling for cool things to do in class. I developed a music bingo game <https://github.com/ccosse/MusicBingo> (original to me but not the first) in the first weeks. That went-over very well and I’ve been thinking of ways to extend and improve upon it. I borrowed an iPad from the school and I’ve got a Raspberry-Pi3 setup as a server already. I’m thinking that a good software activity would be to have the kids sitting in a circle with their iPads and a bingo screen served by the R-Pi in the middle of the circle (or wherever). In other words, digital music bingo, whereas it’s currently just printed paper sheets and drawing notes etc from a hat. This type of setup appeals to me software-wise, as it would remain an interactive group activity and still make use of technology. The tech is right there in-their-face, still, but it might as well be a physical game board made of card stock. The benefit is that the teacher wouldn’t have to run around checking all the answers, and things like that.
Code schools. Once again, it’s gonna come down to the teachers at the code school. God help us!
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 12:53 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Useful summary of on-line Python 3 tutorials, starting with the one in docs.python.org itself:
https://medium.com/@lockpaddy/10-resources-to-learn-python-3 -9a735db7aff9#.mabvr7g8l
Is it just me or am I sensing a strong pull towards Python 3, away from 2.x?
My meditation, also on Medium, published today, is a more generic meditation on code schools.
https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/is-code-school-the-new-high- school-30a8874170b
I mention Python quite a bit, in my appraisal of the looming digital divide and how to bridge it.
I've invited more math teachers to comment as what I write concerns them:
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2845880
None of these are new themes on edu-sig.
If you check my other Medium writings, you'll find a lot more (also blogs).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-cosse> | E-Learning <http://www.asymptopia.org>
-- Linkedin <https://www.linkedin.com/in/charles-cosse> | E-Learning <http://www.asymptopia.org>
Thanks for those thoughts and feedback Charles, on Medium as well. I'm still learning about how to use that technology. Finding other writings in the same ballpark, following and liking, also commenting, is how to develop more of a readership. I have several interconnected published manuscripts, mostly in the ballpark of American Transcendentalism (Emerson, Whitman, Fuller...) meets Quakers (Whitman, Woolman...). AP Study Notes linked. :-D [1] Great question about certification. I think at minimum a code school or high school needs to authenticate that a specific student attended and completed such and such programs and here's a link to the student's on-line portfolio. Whether students go to a brick and mortar building for their work-study is a separate questions. Could be a mix of modalities. As I suggest in the essay, we have two mainstream modes of education: * the work place is a studio, with desktops, canvas objects, tools, which one accumulates and learns to work with (workflows), per best practices * the work place as a succession of classrooms with a locker for personal effects, no personal workspace provided, you're "on tour" or "on a beat" (room to room migration) Those are two ends of a spectrum with many gradations in between. However I'm suggesting the first way is the code school way i.e. lots of "alone time" doing disciplined activities is presumed. I put "alone time" in quotes because a personal workspace (PWS) is in principle interconnected with others via ethernet etc. so really its a matter of learning to carve out free time (slack). There's ambiguity in concepts like "high school" as we spontaneously think of teenagers, whereas it's also an assemblage of study topics and activities (sports, theater....) that's open to oldsters in principle. A forty-year-old newcomer to a community with English as a second language might find herself working on a GED from home, ditto code school. Or with Chinese as a second language if working through a curriculum that's not in English. When I talk about code school and high school "converging" it's less about mixing age groups i.e. having 40-year-olds in a conventional high school, and more about mixing topics. How does the school teach XYZ coordinates? 3D printer? Ray tracer? Visual Python? Or no computers at all? Currently, codes schools don't touch 3D graphics that much because the "front end" (part of being a "full stack developer") has a "flat" (2D) front end (HTML + CSS + SVG). If we start seeing more polyhedrons appearing in the code school setting, to me that'll be a sign that high school and code school are convergent institutions. In historical terms, I'd say the locker-based room-to-room high school is more about becoming a factory worker or crew member who works for the capitalist bosses. You go to the mine everyday, having changed clothes in a locker room, but it's not your mine or oil rig. You're a team player (thanks to sports) and don't require a lot of privacy (maybe a bunk is enough, on a sub). The personal workspace people are being groomed for cubicles or full-fledged offices (officers) and are closer to landed aristocrats in having lots of personal affairs and finances, ownership responsibilities. The conventional high schools were geared more to the factory worker age and still make a good pipeline into military service. Office workers need more personal study space, which is what college provides. Kirby [1] https://www.apstudynotes.org/us-history/topics/transcendentalism-religion-an...
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 7:45 AM, Charles <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
One last reflection: I’m now a long-term sub as a music teacher in the same elementary school that both my children attended. Irrelevant except that I love the school. I’ve never taught music and I’ve got up to nine classes per day with 20–25 kids per class. That’s 200 students from k-5 every day. I am regularly scrambling for cool things to do in class. I developed a music bingo game <https://github.com/ccosse/MusicBingo> (original to me but not the first) in the first weeks. That went-over very well and I’ve been thinking of ways to extend and improve upon it.
I'm responding to this separately, having checked the repo, screen shots especially. I've always been impressed by your productivity and portfolio. You're quite a talented coder in my book, bravo! In my world of 2nd - 7th graders, music / audio has also been a feature. Learning to program with sound is a paradigm personal workspace activity. In a classroom it gets pretty cacophonous if they don't each wear headphones, presuming they're working on various compositions or playing games that use sound (most of them do). As I think I mentioned, Portland is following Seattle in hiring a private company to provide after school / extra-curricular code school activities. This is how convergence is managed today. Our curriculum starts with everyday computer games, including multi-user (over the network), such as National Geographic's Animal Jam. That's where students get ideas about what computers might do, along with motifs such as 1st person (looking from avatar PV), 2nd person (we're a team!) and 3rd person (I am a god observing my creature / creatures). Then we show how MIT Scratch lets you create an avatar on a stage (3rd person) which you may then cause to behave (perform). It's like a puppet show. You can tell a story. Avatars mix with other sprites, each with "costumes", and we're able to attach scripts to each of these, such that they detect mouse clicks and / or collisions with one another. Then we take this whole apparatus of avatar-sprites in background situations and move it to Codesters, which is a partially implemented Python 3 with additional __builtins__ relating to the Scratch-like environment. The skills are transferable, from MIT Scratch to Codesters. Pipeline (ladder): canned games --> build your own Scratch worlds / projects --> build your own Codester worlds / projects --> Cloud9 server in the cloud (host a website) By the time you get to the higher rungs of our ladder, you're basically in code school, a high schooler learning Python + JavaScript + HTML + CSS + SVG Parents / guardians pay extra to have their students dabble in this parallel extra-curricular track, however the high schools appear to be absorbing a lot of this material and incorporating it natively. If they pioneer what I call a "lambda calculus track" [1] featuring more of what we used to think of as vocational topics ("shop"), then there's no reason to depend on outsiders for this content. We often work with the full time teachers coming in and out of the room (it's their room), observing what we're up to, mentally taking notes. Portland Public Schools (PPS) is already well aware of the MIT Scratch option and uses it internally. I expect they're looking at Codesters more, thanks to Coding with Kids. MIT Scratch is good with music, relative to Codesters. Here's something I wrote to the parents last week (fixed a typo): Thank you for sharing your kids with our program. They're very sociable
and enjoy one another's company. No one feels excluded.
At this level, we know they're only just learning the keyboard. A student asked me today how to capitalize. Long passwords are a challenge. They rise to the occasion.
Nevertheless, MIT Scratch as a platform is where games and puppet shows happen, and these grip their attention. Sometimes they "look inside" and see the "code" -- which in Scratch looks a lot like a jigsaw puzzle. As time goes on, they start seeing coding itself as the most challenging game.
I'm happy to see them collaborate and teach each other, as well as come to me with questions. I booted up my own Scratch application as a demo and shared a few details. However my simple "player piano" is not as entertaining as some of the amazing things the Scratch community has produced.
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/149963280/ (my little demo from today)
Higher up on our ladder, around 5th to 8th grade, we start transitioning from MIT Scratch to Codesters, which is similar yet uses a real computer language (Python).
I've let them use sound a lot, which is somewhat raucous (noisy!) but very accessible. Scratch is much better with sound features than Codesters, so I let them enjoy it while they can.
Thanks again. Your kids are a joy and really seem to have a good time being friendly and helpful to one another, very important in the coding world.
Coding is both a solitary quiet activity, and an intensely social one. The logins and passwords we give them work on other computers, for example at home. Let me know if you have any questions about that. However no homework is required.
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 11:14 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote: Parents / guardians pay extra to have their students dabble in this
parallel extra-curricular track, however the high schools appear to be absorbing a lot of this material and incorporating it natively.
If they pioneer what I call a "lambda calculus track" [1] featuring more of what we used to think of as vocational topics ("shop"), then there's no reason to depend on outsiders for this content.
[1] https://youtu.be/eTDH7m4vEiM Kirby
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 12:14 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm responding to this separately, having checked the repo, screen shots especially. I've always been impressed by your productivity and portfolio. You're quite a talented coder in my book, bravo!
Thank you. I'm looking for a new job btw :)
In my world of 2nd - 7th graders, music / audio has also been a feature. Learning to program with sound is a paradigm personal workspace activity.
In a classroom it gets pretty cacophonous if they don't each wear headphones, presuming they're working on various compositions or playing games that use sound (most of them do).
As I think I mentioned, Portland is following Seattle in hiring a private company to provide after school / extra-curricular code school activities. This is how convergence is managed today.
Any place for PDX Guild to expand operations and benefit from that? They deserve it, and in a just world they should get a piece of that action. They are the pioneers of the code school phenomenon.
Our curriculum starts with everyday computer games, including multi-user (over the network), such as National Geographic's Animal Jam. That's where students get ideas about what computers might do, along with motifs such as 1st person (looking from avatar PV), 2nd person (we're a team!) and 3rd person (I am a god observing my creature / creatures).
Then we show how MIT Scratch lets you create an avatar on a stage (3rd person) which you may then cause to behave (perform). It's like a puppet show. You can tell a story. Avatars mix with other sprites, each with "costumes", and we're able to attach scripts to each of these, such that they detect mouse clicks and / or collisions with one another.
Then we take this whole apparatus of avatar-sprites in background situations and move it to Codesters, which is a partially implemented Python 3 with additional __builtins__ relating to the Scratch-like environment. The skills are transferable, from MIT Scratch to Codesters.
Pipeline (ladder):
canned games --> build your own Scratch worlds / projects --> build your own Codester worlds / projects --> Cloud9 server in the cloud (host a website)
code school, a high schooler learning Python + JavaScript + HTML + CSS + SVG
Does Javascript only enter after rung 3, i.e. through Codesters it's all Python, then port as webapp to "the cloud"? That Bingo game I was referring to, I started in Python and used Pillow to generate the Bingo card images at first. But early-on I went through the remainder of the
By the time you get to the higher rungs of our ladder, you're basically in process that would be necessary in order to have usable cards by morning and realized that I needed to be copying images from my browser into Google Docs, then export as PDF and take to Kinko's in the morning. So I ported it to Javascript right there and could have bypassed the Python prototype stage. This happens all the time to me, i.e. Javascript does things that only Python could do before, and I opt for Javascript. I think Javascript should be taught early, perhaps even first. I would have never said such a thing a few years ago.
Parents / guardians pay extra to have their students dabble in this parallel extra-curricular track, however the high schools appear to be absorbing a lot of this material and incorporating it natively.
If they pioneer what I call a "lambda calculus track" [1] featuring more of what we used to think of as vocational topics ("shop"), then there's no reason to depend on outsiders for this content.
You're talking HS here, but also code schools ... do any code schools get into either of the 2 math tracks you describe? If no, then that's a big difference between the two forms of code school.
We often work with the full time teachers coming in and out of the room (it's their room), observing what we're up to, mentally taking notes. Portland Public Schools (PPS) is already well aware of the MIT Scratch option and uses it internally. I expect they're looking at Codesters more, thanks to Coding with Kids.
Oh to live in a tech hub ...
MIT Scratch is good with music, relative to Codesters. Here's something I wrote to the parents last week (fixed a typo):
I played with HTML5 MIDI ... in Jython I used to use the Java MIDI API, and the associated sound engines. In HTML5 the best I could determine was that you have to write your own synth ... I hope I'm wrong, or that an alternative comes along. I just want a piano sound via the HTML5 MIDI API. Any suggestions?
Thank you for sharing your kids with our program. They're very sociable
and enjoy one another's company. No one feels excluded.
At this level, we know they're only just learning the keyboard. A student asked me today how to capitalize. Long passwords are a challenge. They rise to the occasion.
Nevertheless, MIT Scratch as a platform is where games and puppet shows happen, and these grip their attention. Sometimes they "look inside" and see the "code" -- which in Scratch looks a lot like a jigsaw puzzle. As time goes on, they start seeing coding itself as the most challenging game.
I'm happy to see them collaborate and teach each other, as well as come to me with questions. I booted up my own Scratch application as a demo and shared a few details. However my simple "player piano" is not as entertaining as some of the amazing things the Scratch community has produced.
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/149963280/ (my little demo from today)
Higher up on our ladder, around 5th to 8th grade, we start transitioning from MIT Scratch to Codesters, which is similar yet uses a real computer language (Python).
I've let them use sound a lot, which is somewhat raucous (noisy!) but very accessible. Scratch is much better with sound features than Codesters, so I let them enjoy it while they can.
Thanks again. Your kids are a joy and really seem to have a good time being friendly and helpful to one another, very important in the coding world.
Coding is both a solitary quiet activity, and an intensely social one. The logins and passwords we give them work on other computers, for example at home. Let me know if you have any questions about that. However no homework is required.
Sounds like a great job!
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 8:23 PM, Charles <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Any place for PDX Guild to expand operations and benefit from that? They deserve it, and in a just world they should get a piece of that action. They are the pioneers of the code school phenomenon.
I sent them a copy of my article, and at one time we had some high schoolers stopping in on Mondays, refugees from a system that wasn't up to teaching what they wanted to learn, shades of South Africa. https://flic.kr/p/GijkVp (high school refugee) However, my impression is most code schools are currently locked into this model of taking unemployed folks, perhaps with injuries that keep them from doing their earlier work, and trying to turn them into "full stack developers" in about 9-12 weeks, plus or minus. That's a laudable goal, but somewhat different from teaching the "three Rs" as I'm proposing. Probably when I set up my network of Quaker-run boarding schools, I'll be using code schools (what I've learned from them) as a template, but I'll skip the "boot camp" model or call it something else.
Does Javascript only enter after rung 3, i.e. through Codesters it's all Python, then port as webapp to "the cloud"? That Bingo game I was referring to, I started in Python and used Pillow to generate the Bingo card images at first. But early-on I went through the remainder of the process that would be necessary in order to have usable cards by morning and realized that I needed to be copying images from my browser into Google Docs, then export as PDF and take to Kinko's in the morning. So I ported it to Javascript right there and could have bypassed the Python prototype stage. This happens all the time to me, i.e. Javascript does things that only Python could do before, and I opt for Javascript. I think Javascript should be taught early, perhaps even first. I would have never said such a thing a few years ago.
There's no concept of Web Dev prior to Cloud9, which is where JS + HTML + CSS comes in, using Codepen (in addition to C9). Here's the picture I drew for parents that dropped in today, final day of Winter term: https://flic.kr/p/Tc11Aa That's a swimming pole with two diving boards, a low one (MIT Scratch) and a higher one (Codesters). The low one is familiar, close to game-like, whereas the "high dive" (Codesters) is somewhat scarier (more a bridge to somewhere else). They're analogous however. In a given session, they might do one high divey task, two low hanging fruit, and play the rest of the time. Even the play teaches skills. Once they've mastered these two development environments (Scratch and Codesters), they're ready to tackle web development. JavaScript + HTML + CSS (+ SVG?) all come into the picture as an integrated whole, thanks to Codepen in particular. I know there's a lot of interest in JavaScript as the only programming language one needs. The so-called MEAN stack and all that. However, JavaScript is a moving target with all those trans-pilers and TypeScript / CoffeeScript type dialects, with ES5, ES6, ES7... really quite messy, a moving target. My attitude is learning Python will give you entre and then JavaScript will seem somewhat familiar, especially the newer versions which have a class construct more like Python's.
Parents / guardians pay extra to have their students dabble in this parallel extra-curricular track, however the high schools appear to be absorbing a lot of this material and incorporating it natively.
If they pioneer what I call a "lambda calculus track" [1] featuring more of what we used to think of as vocational topics ("shop"), then there's no reason to depend on outsiders for this content.
You're talking HS here, but also code schools ... do any code schools get into either of the 2 math tracks you describe? If no, then that's a big difference between the two forms of code school.
Code schools will do data science and machine learning on the side, which both feature big data. These are the buzzwords of the moment. My lambda track includes a fair amount of crypto, and that's featured today when they study HTTPS, RSA and hashlib type algorithms. SHA-1 recently cracked and blah blah. I'd consider code schools somewhere between high schools and college, in terms of the topics they cover, and the number of weeks / months / years they take to master (vs. cover). Given the pressure to get a job and to become a "full stack developer" as soon as possible, there's not much time for straying too far off that beaten track in the standard model. The code schools I envision teach classes in 3D printing, making art, doing various kinds of math and science, without having to prove these are what "full stack developers" need. I'd like to not care about the full stack developer track so exclusively. One goes to code school for other reasons, such as to improve one's high school math teaching abilities. Jupyter Notebooks are a great example. A company our school could use those in-house, to share curriculum, but getting a math teacher up to speed with JN technology is a rather different pathway than training a full stack developer. A code school needs multiple pathways. We had that at OST. I'd like code schools to freely focus on serving a wider clientele, I guess I'm saying. Many companies already do this (e.g. LearningTree) and are among the code schools I consider successful. Portland has a lot of talented people who would gladly teach 4-5 day classes in something esoteric (e.g. Regular Expressions, Haskell, Pyret...) but would never commit to teaching a boot camp for full stack developers. I'd like to set up the school to offer paying gigs to individuals on a temporary basis. We'd have a large talent pool of willing faculty. Pretty much all 1099s and no W2s if you wanna talk turkey in IRS terms (contractors not employees). Lots more people get to add "taught code school" to their resumes that way too.
We often work with the full time teachers coming in and out of the room (it's their room), observing what we're up to, mentally taking notes. Portland Public Schools (PPS) is already well aware of the MIT Scratch option and uses it internally. I expect they're looking at Codesters more, thanks to Coding with Kids.
Oh to live in a tech hub ...
MIT Scratch is good with music, relative to Codesters. Here's something I wrote to the parents last week (fixed a typo):
I played with HTML5 MIDI ... in Jython I used to use the Java MIDI API, and the associated sound engines. In HTML5 the best I could determine was that you have to write your own synth ... I hope I'm wrong, or that an alternative comes along. I just want a piano sound via the HTML5 MIDI API. Any suggestions?
Nope, maybe someone will chime in. I'm on the csound listserv, csound being a full featured music synth system, open source, but hard to use and develop in. I don't think it uses HTML5 API but I could be wrong (I'm no expert). I'm happy enough just using MIT Scratch at the moment, for anything musical. My demo app shows the notes changing on the keyboard, as it plays, and the code makes it clear how that happens. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/149963280/ I'm a big believer in "two languages is more than twice as good as knowing one" because when we compare and contrast, see similarities and differences, we get that "stereo" view. For example, when a Windows user, I'd go over to Linux for awhile and study hard, then come back to Windows really understanding Windows better too. When you use more than one operating system, you start to get "what's on OS" (I'd also used mainframes and minis, before hobbyist boxes went viral) When you know more bases than 10, you for the first time start to get "what's a base". [ For this reason I have only derision for the US Common Core standards which mandate "base 10 only". When I saw that I knew for certain these standards were not written by anyone with much computing experience. Fortunately I squeaked through elementary school when New Math was at its apex and got it about "number bases" as early as 2nd grade, unbelievable by today's retrograde / degenerate standards. When that New Math song by Tom Lehrer came out, I was just learning addition, and when he made fun of the base 8 version, I said "what's wrong, I did everything right?" which made the adults in the room laugh even harder ] Anyway, I'm excited by the prospect of teaching / learning Python and JavaScript in an overlapping manner. Here's a Jupyter Notebook on that topic: http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/Python5/blob/master/Comparing...
Thanks again. Your kids are a joy and really seem to have a good time
being friendly and helpful to one another, very important in the coding world.
Coding is both a solitary quiet activity, and an intensely social one. The logins and passwords we give them work on other computers, for example at home. Let me know if you have any questions about that. However no homework is required.
Sounds like a great job!
I'm learning a lot. For me it's about ethnography and understanding my ambient culture better. The kids showed me some of the games they play (the "swimming pool" in the model), like Animal Jam (National Geographic) or whatever. Eye opening. These kids are very sociable, not mean to each other. They're also well able to concentrate, solve puzzles. That's true in both troupes I'm working with. Maybe I just got lucky. Kirby
python3
From https://westurner.org/wiki/awesome-python-testing#python-2-python-3 : Python 2 <--> Python 3 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ * https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-porting * http://python3porting.com/ * `2to3`_, `six`_, `nine`_, `future`_ 2to3 ^^^^^ | Src: https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Lib/lib2to3 | Docs: https://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html | Docs: https://docs.python.org/3/library/2to3.html * https://hg.python.org/cpython/file/tip/Lib/lib2to3/Grammar.txt * https://pythonhosted.org/setuptools/python3.html#supporting-both-python-2-an... six ^^^^ | Src: hg https://bitbucket.org/gutworth/six | PyPI: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/six/ | Docs: https://pythonhosted.org/six/ * https://pythonhosted.org/six/#module-six.moves nine ^^^^^^ | Src: git https://github.com/nandoflorestan/nine | PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/nine * https://github.com/nandoflorestan/nine/blob/master/nine/__init__.py future ^^^^^^^ | Src: git https://github.com/PythonCharmers/python-future | PyPI: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/future | Docs: http://python-future.org/ * http://python-future.org/compatible_idioms.html ... - https://k12cs.org/ - https://medium.freecodecamp.com/ - https://medium.com/@codeorg - https://medium.com/@singularityu - https://medium.com/@OfficeofEdTech - https://medium.com/@OfficeofEdTech/following - https://medium.com/@NSF - https://medium.com/@SDSN On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 1:53 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Useful summary of on-line Python 3 tutorials, starting with the one in docs.python.org itself:
https://medium.com/@lockpaddy/10-resources-to-learn-python- 3-9a735db7aff9#.mabvr7g8l
Is it just me or am I sensing a strong pull towards Python 3, away from 2.x?
My meditation, also on Medium, published today, is a more generic meditation on code schools.
https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/is-code-school-the- new-high-school-30a8874170b
I mention Python quite a bit, in my appraisal of the looming digital divide and how to bridge it.
I've invited more math teachers to comment as what I write concerns them:
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2845880
None of these are new themes on edu-sig.
If you check my other Medium writings, you'll find a lot more (also blogs).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 12:19 AM, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university#table-of-contents http://competency-checklist.appspot.com/
On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 1:53 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Useful summary of on-line Python 3 tutorials, starting with the one in docs.python.org itself:
https://medium.com/@lockpaddy/10-resources-to-learn-python-3 -9a735db7aff9#.mabvr7g8l
Is it just me or am I sensing a strong pull towards Python 3, away from 2.x?
My meditation, also on Medium, published today, is a more generic meditation on code schools.
https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/is-code-school-the-new-high- school-30a8874170b
I mention Python quite a bit, in my appraisal of the looming digital divide and how to bridge it.
I've invited more math teachers to comment as what I write concerns them:
http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2845880
None of these are new themes on edu-sig.
If you check my other Medium writings, you'll find a lot more (also blogs).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
This one is consistent with letting math teachers out of the box in that it promotes a cross-disciplinary approach. "The framework can be used in a variety of ways. It can inform curriculum development, standards development, K–12 pathways, teacher preparation and professional development, and classroom assessment, among others. It can be implemented as standalone courses or integrated into other subject areas, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels. You can read more in the *Implementation Guidance *chapter." If you're learning programming in math, physics, art and music class, you might not need a "computer science" track in addition. What you need are teachers involved in developing the school's curriculum, to make it be self consistent, a work of art in its own right. Thanks for the great links Wes! Kirby
+1 On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 2:09 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
This one is consistent with letting math teachers out of the box in that it promotes a cross-disciplinary approach.
"The framework can be used in a variety of ways. It can inform curriculum development, standards development, K–12 pathways, teacher preparation and professional development, and classroom assessment, among others. It can be implemented as standalone courses or integrated into other subject areas, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels. You can read more in the *Implementation Guidance *chapter."
If you're learning programming in math, physics, art and music class, you might not need a "computer science" track in addition.
What you need are teachers involved in developing the school's curriculum, to make it be self consistent, a work of art in its own right.
Thanks for the great links Wes!
Kirby
participants (3)
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Charles
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kirby urner
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Wes Turner