I had a successful breakthrough regarding my Saturday Academy class in Python Mathematics: use kepler.dodecahedron and plato.dodecahedron to show why dodecahedron alone is ambiguous and/or why a name collision might happen. That was part of a much longer thread on what I'm calling the four eras of computer programming: wild west (spaghetti code); civilized (structured programming); organic (OO); and managed (design patterns). As you may gather, I'm so far not blown away by the relevance of lambda calculus. One student asked how 3D Mandelbrot Sets were mathematically determined, given he understands the 2D case using the complex plane. I guessed using Quaternions but who wants to tell me for sure? My guess formed a good branching off point, in any case. I had 'em dive into VPython today, with just the API docs and a few pointers as I fumbled, beginner-like, in a projected IDLE session (later, I'd show them where to download a stash of canned VPython polyhedra -- a star student got it going in no time, started exploring my methods). Even the youngest had a space ship with two solar panels to show his mom when she came by to collect him. And my fractal guy, he had Saturn saved in planets.py, using a ring and a sphere object. We discovered how to do color, first by setting object.red object.green and object.blue (pause to re-explain RGB), then by setting object.color to color.somecolor (the visual.color module just has a very few -- I'd think they'd want more, especially given the lack of textures). I also downloaded, installed and booted up Panda3D on the Toshiba (my laptop on the projector). We started with Greeting Card then went exploring. One of the Panda demos quickly tosses out a 3D fractal tree with a few keyboard controls. All of these are Python programs, with the C++ API imported (I still haven't solved the dark matter problem, alluding to blog). So yes, we finally went graphical today, which was a big step. I also projected video.google of a fractal, me talking about domes, and Chieh doing one of his Tk-with-Python lectures. The technology is still a tad too low rez, so I can see where all that optical fiber might come in useful some day. We could watch Chieh in high rez and actually read what he's typing. I also shared a bit of Eskimo culture on You-tube. Last week, session three [*], was a lot of dense number theory with modulo operator, very left brain, nothing especially graphical. So I'm glad we got good and GUI today. I've been promising we would. Today I made good. Kirby [*] http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1380445