seasonal challenge to calculator dominance in high schools
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys). This year: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/mast... That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator. Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom). Kirby
Hi Kirby, I think kids should write their own plotting routines to graph their functions starting anywhere 3rd-7th grade. In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff. AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software. -Charlie On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year:
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/mast...
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- ccosse.github.io
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kirby,
I think kids should write their own plotting routines to graph their functions starting anywhere 3rd-7th grade.
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff.
What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks? - Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective) - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
-Charlie
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_ Tomorrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
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On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:36 AM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff.
What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
It might by now ... but that's another big lesson: don't use somebody else's physics libs ... do that yourself too! For the above problem there is nothing more than F=ma (W=mg ... Weight=mass x accel_due2_grav) ... the rest is circle stuff.
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks?
No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the process of developing their own quick solar system model. It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective) - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
-Charlie
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year:
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/mast...
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
ccosse.github.io
-- ccosse.github.io
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:36 AM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff.
What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
It might by now ... but that's another big lesson: don't use somebody else's physics libs ... do that yourself too! For the above problem there is nothing more than F=ma (W=mg ... Weight=mass x accel_due2_grav) ... the rest is circle stuff.
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks?
No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the process of developing their own quick solar system model. It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
In each reference frame, an observer can use a local coordinate system (most exclusively Cartesian coordinates in this context) to measure lengths, and a clock to measure time intervals. An observer is a real or imaginary entity that can take measurements, say humans, or any other
Do you start with 2D observational data; as a model development exercise? Is that freely available online somewhere? For the 3D cube projected into 2D space rotation problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation living organism—or even robots and computers. An event is something that happens at a point in space at an instant of time, or more formally a point in spacetime. The transformations connect the space and time coordinates of an event as measured by an observer in each frame.[nb 1]
They supersede the Galilean transformation of Newtonian physics, which
assumes an absolute space and time (see Galilean relativity). The Galilean transformation is a good approximation only at relative speeds much smaller than the speed of light. Lorentz transformations have a number of unintuitive features that do not appear in Galilean transformations. For example, they reflect the fact that observers moving at different velocities may measure different distances, elapsed times, and even different orderings of events, but always such that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames. The invariance of light speed is one of the postulates of special relativity.
- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective) - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
-Charlie
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_ Tomorrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
ccosse.github.io
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ccosse.github.io
It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
Do you find teamed presentations to be more effective, contrived, or overwhelming than just speaking aloud to model the cognitive process of model development? Modeling a mature process for correcting for mistakes and errors is sometimes absent from prepared demos that make it look like it's so easy for *them* (because they spent time preparing and rehearsing) On Sunday, June 23, 2019, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:36 AM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff.
What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
It might by now ... but that's another big lesson: don't use somebody else's physics libs ... do that yourself too! For the above problem there is nothing more than F=ma (W=mg ... Weight=mass x accel_due2_grav) ... the rest is circle stuff.
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks?
No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the process of developing their own quick solar system model. It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
Do you start with 2D observational data; as a model development exercise? Is that freely available online somewhere?
For the 3D cube projected into 2D space rotation problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation
In each reference frame, an observer can use a local coordinate system (most exclusively Cartesian coordinates in this context) to measure lengths, and a clock to measure time intervals. An observer is a real or imaginary entity that can take measurements, say humans, or any other living organism—or even robots and computers. An event is something that happens at a point in space at an instant of time, or more formally a point in spacetime. The transformations connect the space and time coordinates of an event as measured by an observer in each frame.[nb 1]
They supersede the Galilean transformation of Newtonian physics, which assumes an absolute space and time (see Galilean relativity). The Galilean transformation is a good approximation only at relative speeds much smaller than the speed of light. Lorentz transformations have a number of unintuitive features that do not appear in Galilean transformations. For example, they reflect the fact that observers moving at different velocities may measure different distances, elapsed times, and even different orderings of events, but always such that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames. The invariance of light speed is one of the postulates of special relativity.
- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective) - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
-Charlie
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_To morrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
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Ahh, that's a good point! But the whole problem can be worked-out from scratch, in front of them in one hour if you're fast. On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:14 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
Do you find teamed presentations to be more effective, contrived, or overwhelming than just speaking aloud to model the cognitive process of model development? Modeling a mature process for correcting for mistakes and errors is sometimes absent from prepared demos that make it look like it's so easy for *them* (because they spent time preparing and rehearsing)
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:36 AM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff.
What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
It might by now ... but that's another big lesson: don't use somebody else's physics libs ... do that yourself too! For the above problem there is nothing more than F=ma (W=mg ... Weight=mass x accel_due2_grav) ... the rest is circle stuff.
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks?
No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the process of developing their own quick solar system model. It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
Do you start with 2D observational data; as a model development exercise? Is that freely available online somewhere?
For the 3D cube projected into 2D space rotation problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation
In each reference frame, an observer can use a local coordinate system (most exclusively Cartesian coordinates in this context) to measure lengths, and a clock to measure time intervals. An observer is a real or imaginary entity that can take measurements, say humans, or any other living organism—or even robots and computers. An event is something that happens at a point in space at an instant of time, or more formally a point in spacetime. The transformations connect the space and time coordinates of an event as measured by an observer in each frame.[nb 1]
They supersede the Galilean transformation of Newtonian physics, which assumes an absolute space and time (see Galilean relativity). The Galilean transformation is a good approximation only at relative speeds much smaller than the speed of light. Lorentz transformations have a number of unintuitive features that do not appear in Galilean transformations. For example, they reflect the fact that observers moving at different velocities may measure different distances, elapsed times, and even different orderings of events, but always such that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames. The invariance of light speed is one of the postulates of special relativity.
- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective) - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
-Charlie
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year:
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/mast...
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
ccosse.github.io
--
ccosse.github.io
-- ccosse.github.io
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Ahh, that's a good point! But the whole problem can be worked-out from scratch, in front of them in one hour if you're fast.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method Just don't hold up a finger when you've solved it and you should be fine.
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:14 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
Do you find teamed presentations to be more effective, contrived, or overwhelming than just speaking aloud to model the cognitive process of model development? Modeling a mature process for correcting for mistakes and errors is sometimes absent from prepared demos that make it look like it's so easy for *them* (because they spent time preparing and rehearsing)
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:36 AM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff.
What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
It might by now ... but that's another big lesson: don't use somebody else's physics libs ... do that yourself too! For the above problem there is nothing more than F=ma (W=mg ... Weight=mass x accel_due2_grav) ... the rest is circle stuff.
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks?
No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the process of developing their own quick solar system model. It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
Do you start with 2D observational data; as a model development exercise? Is that freely available online somewhere?
For the 3D cube projected into 2D space rotation problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation
In each reference frame, an observer can use a local coordinate system (most exclusively Cartesian coordinates in this context) to measure lengths, and a clock to measure time intervals. An observer is a real or imaginary entity that can take measurements, say humans, or any other living organism—or even robots and computers. An event is something that happens at a point in space at an instant of time, or more formally a point in spacetime. The transformations connect the space and time coordinates of an event as measured by an observer in each frame.[nb 1]
They supersede the Galilean transformation of Newtonian physics, which assumes an absolute space and time (see Galilean relativity). The Galilean transformation is a good approximation only at relative speeds much smaller than the speed of light. Lorentz transformations have a number of unintuitive features that do not appear in Galilean transformations. For example, they reflect the fact that observers moving at different velocities may measure different distances, elapsed times, and even different orderings of events, but always such that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames. The invariance of light speed is one of the postulates of special relativity.
- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective) - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
-Charlie
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of > buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call > them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the > checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys). > > This year: > https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_ > Tomorrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb > > That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the > benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give > my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as > superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator. > > Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if > I'm beating a dead horse (idiom). > > Kirby > > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig >
--
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--
ccosse.github.io
--
ccosse.github.io
On 24/06/19 7:14 AM, Wes Turner wrote:
It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
Do you find teamed presentations to be more effective, contrived, or overwhelming than just speaking aloud to model the cognitive process of model development? Modeling a mature process for correcting for mistakes and errors is sometimes absent from prepared demos that make it look like it's so easy for *them* (because they spent time preparing and rehearsing)
That is a very good question! Speaking personally, I'm ALWAYS suspicious of smooth, slick, presentations - but then I was 'trained' into this ?negativity by IBM salesmen, Oracle, MSFT, Apple, ad-nauseum. Whilst I don't attempt to 'play along at home' (concurrent to the presentation), I do prefer to try something for myself - wherein the cynic expect to find that the 'slick' applies to the presenter and the product/code actually has many rough-edges and 'gotchas'. On one hand there is the question of split-attention: do I (the trainee) pay attention to the lecturer or to the code-display? (or the pretty ... two rows in-front?) Alternately, isn't it painful having to sit and watch whilst someone types - and mistypes - a wall of code? To generate the elusive attention and interest mentioned, nothing succeeds like success. Accordingly, something quick-and-dirty which illustrates both the (depth of the) problem and an answer provides both relevance and engenders motivation. Thereafter one can start to explore the details and difficulties. When you've finished debating presentation, here's something else: there are lots of solutions 'out there', but how important/difficult is that first inspiration of relevance and the assurance that the/an answer is within our grasp? Your thoughts? -- Regards =dn
No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the process of developing their own quick solar system model. It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
I'm all for opt in on athletics like this, as elective activities. Like sprints at a PyCon. Choose to go, choose which one. Time spent coding is time away from studying film theory or maybe perfecting one's drawing or pole vaulting skills. If one wishes to use canned solar system simulators and not work for hours, starting with transistors and designing one's own chips, that oughta be allowed too. Multi-track, kid driven, more like a theme park. The rides are all there. If you think you're ready for the PyGame physics course (I was a VPython avatar, did my hypertoons using it [1]), go for it, and you're only 14. Other people will postpone that lesson until 41. Sequencing is more up to them than to any nanny state.[2] Kirby [1] https://youtu.be/7Qzd0Uw-HCM (simple hypertoon in Visual Python) 40 seconds, no sound [2] they say the "nana" in that 'House of Tomorrow' book is more fascist than in the movie. The movie-makers cast an authentic Bucky fan who had some of her own footage of being with the guy, which was perfect. To my ears, they actually dubbed in Bucky's voice in those parts where we presumably heard him (grainy old footage) -- sounded like an actor to me. Doesn't matter much. Hollywood has its tricks.
I agree with everything you say, but I'm just talking about day #1 of algebra class ... pretty much just an inspirational show and demonstration that satisfying capabilities are within their reach On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:11 PM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the process of developing their own quick solar system model. It would be a good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big screen.
I'm all for opt in on athletics like this, as elective activities. Like sprints at a PyCon. Choose to go, choose which one.
Time spent coding is time away from studying film theory or maybe perfecting one's drawing or pole vaulting skills.
If one wishes to use canned solar system simulators and not work for hours, starting with transistors and designing one's own chips, that oughta be allowed too.
Multi-track, kid driven, more like a theme park. The rides are all there.
If you think you're ready for the PyGame physics course (I was a VPython avatar, did my hypertoons using it [1]), go for it, and you're only 14.
Other people will postpone that lesson until 41.
Sequencing is more up to them than to any nanny state.[2]
Kirby
[1] https://youtu.be/7Qzd0Uw-HCM (simple hypertoon in Visual Python) 40 seconds, no sound
[2] they say the "nana" in that 'House of Tomorrow' book is more fascist than in the movie. The movie-makers cast an authentic Bucky fan who had some of her own footage of being with the guy, which was perfect. To my ears, they actually dubbed in Bucky's voice in those parts where we presumably heard him (grainy old footage) -- sounded like an actor to me. Doesn't matter much. Hollywood has its tricks.
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- ccosse.github.io
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:31 PM C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree with everything you say, but I'm just talking about day #1 of algebra class ... pretty much just an inspirational show and demonstration that satisfying capabilities are within their reach
Youtube stardom awaits you. Seriously, the content you have out there is good quality. I did a Pygame solar system once but it wasn't laws of physics or anything, I just had spheres going in circles (with a moon for earth even). Fun fun! Kirby
Oh yeah! the moon ... what an opportunity to exercise the benefits of object-oriented programming right there ... thing1.orbit(thing2) ... On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:34 PM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:31 PM C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree with everything you say, but I'm just talking about day #1 of algebra class ... pretty much just an inspirational show and demonstration that satisfying capabilities are within their reach
Youtube stardom awaits you. Seriously, the content you have out there is good quality.
I did a Pygame solar system once but it wasn't laws of physics or anything, I just had spheres going in circles (with a moon for earth even). Fun fun!
Kirby
-- ccosse.github.io
Another plotting exercise: MathClock / MathCircle With X, Y coordinates, - Draw a circle - Draw a circle around the origin - Label degrees (360; Babylonian base 12) - Label fractional radians - Label 12 hours - Label the 60 minutes - Draw clock hands And then do the same with radial coordinates ... Number representations: change of base; Columns in e.g. Pandas; Trigonometry: Sin, Cos On Sunday, June 23, 2019, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kirby,
I think kids should write their own plotting routines to graph their functions starting anywhere 3rd-7th grade.
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff.
What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks?
- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective) - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
-Charlie
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_To morrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
ccosse.github.io
I think dragging them through a non-trivial project start-to-finish in one intro lesson can be effective at reaching students because it shows them everything (which is not so much) that lies between them and a completed application/product, thereby giving them hope and not scaring them that it's too much of a mountain ahead ... On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:04 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
Another plotting exercise: MathClock / MathCircle
With X, Y coordinates, - Draw a circle - Draw a circle around the origin - Label degrees (360; Babylonian base 12) - Label fractional radians - Label 12 hours - Label the 60 minutes - Draw clock hands
And then do the same with radial coordinates
... Number representations: change of base; Columns in e.g. Pandas; Trigonometry: Sin, Cos
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kirby,
I think kids should write their own plotting routines to graph their functions starting anywhere 3rd-7th grade.
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff.
What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program looks fun, too
AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think appropriate for these tasks?
- Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective) - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
-Charlie
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year:
https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/mast...
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
ccosse.github.io
-- ccosse.github.io
Another modeling activity that's fun is starting with a giant spreadsheet (maybe a pandas DataFrame) wherein the columns are xyz coordinates of ballerina body sensors. As we know, the movie industry uses these sensors routinely, to bring an actor into a virtual reality (e.g. Gollum in Lord of the Rings). We had an outfit in Nebraska do the recordings and I translated the sensor data into stick figure renderings, kind of eerie. Pipeline: sensor data (excel) --> python --> povray --> frame-joiner --> movie https://youtu.be/38iz0-dopSg https://youtu.be/3WehC6LxZe8 This requires knowing enough scene description language to have Python write out coherent scripts, frame after frame, to the rendering engine (free open source povray). Lots of coordinate system practice, with movie-making an end result. I'd like students to have access to Civilization type games but with full planets rendered as hexapents. No need to code it from scratch unless they pay you. At some point, you need to say "hey, even adults aren't working this hard for nothing". Calendar time including timezones and daylight savings definitely core curriculum, no question, glad we have datetime tools. Again, back to the end of the calculator era, they suck at calendar datetime, and besides, the API of a bazzillion little buttons sucks. Kirby https://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-first-person-physics.html (First Person Physics, University of Nebraska) https://youtu.be/sguOvRlHjn0 (more hypertoons) On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:04 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
Another plotting exercise: MathClock / MathCircle
With X, Y coordinates, - Draw a circle - Draw a circle around the origin - Label degrees (360; Babylonian base 12) - Label fractional radians - Label 12 hours - Label the 60 minutes - Draw clock hands
And then do the same with radial coordinates
... Number representations: change of base; Columns in e.g. Pandas; Trigonometry: Sin, Cos
I'll bet every one of those graphing calcs has also been replicated as a phone app That's cool stuff there! (yours) On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:30 PM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Another modeling activity that's fun is starting with a giant spreadsheet (maybe a pandas DataFrame) wherein the columns are xyz coordinates of ballerina body sensors. As we know, the movie industry uses these sensors routinely, to bring an actor into a virtual reality (e.g. Gollum in Lord of the Rings).
We had an outfit in Nebraska do the recordings and I translated the sensor data into stick figure renderings, kind of eerie.
Pipeline: sensor data (excel) --> python --> povray --> frame-joiner --> movie
https://youtu.be/38iz0-dopSg https://youtu.be/3WehC6LxZe8
This requires knowing enough scene description language to have Python write out coherent scripts, frame after frame, to the rendering engine (free open source povray).
Lots of coordinate system practice, with movie-making an end result.
I'd like students to have access to Civilization type games but with full planets rendered as hexapents. No need to code it from scratch unless they pay you. At some point, you need to say "hey, even adults aren't working this hard for nothing".
Calendar time including timezones and daylight savings definitely core curriculum, no question, glad we have datetime tools.
Again, back to the end of the calculator era, they suck at calendar datetime, and besides, the API of a bazzillion little buttons sucks.
Kirby
https://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-first-person-physics.html (First Person Physics, University of Nebraska) https://youtu.be/sguOvRlHjn0 (more hypertoons)
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:04 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
Another plotting exercise: MathClock / MathCircle
With X, Y coordinates, - Draw a circle - Draw a circle around the origin - Label degrees (360; Babylonian base 12) - Label fractional radians - Label 12 hours - Label the 60 minutes - Draw clock hands
And then do the same with radial coordinates
... Number representations: change of base; Columns in e.g. Pandas; Trigonometry: Sin, Cos
-- ccosse.github.io
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
I'll bet every one of those graphing calcs has also been replicated as a phone app
That's cool stuff there! (yours)
Yeah, that's really cool. Was the MoCap (motion capture) done at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO)? They've a new Biomechanics facility next to the soccer field over there. There are a bunch of cool videos demoing simulated agents learning to walk with evolutionary algorithms (mutation, crossover, cost function) https://github.com/openai/mujoco-py/blob/master/README.md#usage-examples https://youtube.com/results?search_query=openai+learning+to+walk By comparison, my old offline graphing calculator is a frustrating piece of work with no QWERTY keyboard. In building a table out of a rolling cart, 2x6's, a melamine sheet, and some brackets, I had need for rigid body dynamics; to determine how much force would cause the table to fall over. After not finding any existing open source software with actual calculations and a few q&a questions with some equations and parameters, I considered trying to add support to FreeCAD (with cadquery and Jupyter Notebook) for rollover risk. It was a good review of counterbalancing forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rigid_body_dynamics
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:30 PM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Another modeling activity that's fun is starting with a giant spreadsheet (maybe a pandas DataFrame) wherein the columns are xyz coordinates of ballerina body sensors. As we know, the movie industry uses these sensors routinely, to bring an actor into a virtual reality (e.g. Gollum in Lord of the Rings).
We had an outfit in Nebraska do the recordings and I translated the sensor data into stick figure renderings, kind of eerie.
Pipeline: sensor data (excel) --> python --> povray --> frame-joiner --> movie
https://youtu.be/38iz0-dopSg https://youtu.be/3WehC6LxZe8
This requires knowing enough scene description language to have Python write out coherent scripts, frame after frame, to the rendering engine (free open source povray).
Lots of coordinate system practice, with movie-making an end result.
I'd like students to have access to Civilization type games but with full planets rendered as hexapents. No need to code it from scratch unless they pay you. At some point, you need to say "hey, even adults aren't working this hard for nothing".
Calendar time including timezones and daylight savings definitely core curriculum, no question, glad we have datetime tools.
Again, back to the end of the calculator era, they suck at calendar datetime, and besides, the API of a bazzillion little buttons sucks.
Kirby
https://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2006/04/more-first-person-physics.html (First Person Physics, University of Nebraska) https://youtu.be/sguOvRlHjn0 (more hypertoons)
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:04 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
Another plotting exercise: MathClock / MathCircle
With X, Y coordinates, - Draw a circle - Draw a circle around the origin - Label degrees (360; Babylonian base 12) - Label fractional radians - Label 12 hours - Label the 60 minutes - Draw clock hands
And then do the same with radial coordinates
... Number representations: change of base; Columns in e.g. Pandas; Trigonometry: Sin, Cos
--
ccosse.github.io
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:57 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
I'll bet every one of those graphing calcs has also been replicated as a phone app
That's cool stuff there! (yours)
Yeah, that's really cool. Was the MoCap (motion capture) done at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO)? They've a new Biomechanics facility next to the soccer field over there.
Thanks, I think the MoCap was done at a gait analysis lab, before facial recognition got so good (actually it's not either / or). They'd like to know who that guy is over there on the camera based on his distinctive walk. However the Dr. Fuller First Person Physics initiative piggy-backed on all that to study human motion as physics. Turning on those contrails was maybe my idea. "First person physics" was my coin as far as Dr. Bob Fuller (no relation to Bucky) was concerned, and he made me webmaster for the project.
There are a bunch of cool videos demoing simulated agents learning to walk with evolutionary algorithms (mutation, crossover, cost function) https://github.com/openai/mujoco-py/blob/master/README.md#usage-examples
https://youtube.com/results?search_query=openai+learning+to+walk
Yes, my friend Gerald de Jong was a first adapter of "elastic interval geometry" where every "rod" is a tension-compression spring governed by mathematics. He put creatures made as tensegrities in a simulation and selected for which was able to walk furthest, of course adding a concept of gravity + friction (traction). https://youtu.be/_II-uESToOs (done in Java, Gerald an early adopter since JavaOne, when he came to visit me in Oregon on his way back) That's the same Gerald I cite in my online Google slides, who came up with a tetrahedron volume formula very like Euler's, but geared to give output in tetravolumes. I have it in Python. By comparison, my old offline graphing calculator is a frustrating piece of
work with no QWERTY keyboard.
The issue is the personal workspace (PWS) and providing the ergonomics of at least a cubicle to people that young. Once you're college age, you have a dorm with internet and library study carrels, we hope. But already you're going into debt for that. Babies don't know how to drive for Uber, if you know what I mean. Like how will the younger kids ever get the political clout they'll need, to get out of that "locker and tiny desk" rat race (eat lunch the nearby fast food places, how convenient!). How will they ever find time to develop a private stash of Jupyter Notebooks in such crowded crushing daycare centers? Might as well be jail. At the School of Tomorrow, I assume students are kicked back in private quarters, like in the movie (the kids each have their own room, not just the dome kid). In building a table out of a rolling cart, 2x6's, a melamine sheet, and
some brackets, I had need for rigid body dynamics; to determine how much force would cause the table to fall over. After not finding any existing open source software with actual calculations and a few q&a questions with some equations and parameters, I considered trying to add support to FreeCAD (with cadquery and Jupyter Notebook) for rollover risk.
I had a gig sharing CAD online with middle schoolers. Not Blender. Something cloud. Even the schools using Macs found it slow going. We had Chromebooks as backup. What was it called again? I'm scanning through a plethora of free online tools and not finding it. Maybe it was the wifi connection that was slow. I don't think 3D CAD is something you just learn in an hour. The dashboard (GUI) is intimidating, even though this is a "dumbed down" version. We're all free to dream of our castle-in-the-sky curriculum (I certainly do that a lot) wherein the hardware problem has already been solved, but short of turning high rise floor space -- already used for cubicles -- into high schools, I'm not sure how to solve the problem. Making them use itty bitty calculators or tiny computers is designing for claustrophobia. One laptop per child (a goal, not an achievement yet), leads to a next question: where do you plug it in and get some quality time with it, and the people reachable through it? How do you keep it from being stolen and/or banned in your state? You're relatively little, surrounded by bigger people who always think they know better. Anyway, I think it's great we get to play with physics engines. Even Codesters, which I use a lot to teach Python (just signed up for more business), has primitive gravity and bounce effects you can toggle on and off. Not a full Python implementation (no yield statement, does include classes). Kirby
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:57 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
I'll bet every one of those graphing calcs has also been replicated as a phone app
That's cool stuff there! (yours)
Yeah, that's really cool. Was the MoCap (motion capture) done at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO)? They've a new Biomechanics facility next to the soccer field over there.
Thanks, I think the MoCap was done at a gait analysis lab, before facial recognition got so good (actually it's not either / or). They'd like to know who that guy is over there on the camera based on his distinctive walk. However the Dr. Fuller First Person Physics initiative piggy-backed on all that to study human motion as physics. Turning on those contrails was maybe my idea.
Simulating glowstringing / poi seemed like a fun problem one day. Experts would likely make light work of it for unknown returns.
"First person physics" was my coin as far as Dr. Bob Fuller (no relation to Bucky) was concerned, and he made me webmaster for the project.
Hugo (Go, Markdown, ~Jupyter Notebook support) and Tinkerer (Python, Sphinx, RST) work with GitLab Pages and GitHub + CI or probably the new GitHub Actions. Jupyter-book or nbsphinx.
There are a bunch of cool videos demoing simulated agents learning to walk
with evolutionary algorithms (mutation, crossover, cost function) https://github.com/openai/mujoco-py/blob/master/README.md#usage-examples
https://youtube.com/results?search_query=openai+learning+to+walk
Yes, my friend Gerald de Jong was a first adapter of "elastic interval geometry" where every "rod" is a tension-compression spring governed by mathematics. He put creatures made as tensegrities in a simulation and selected for which was able to walk furthest, of course adding a concept of gravity + friction (traction).
TIL about Tensegrity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity
https://youtu.be/_II-uESToOs (done in Java, Gerald an early adopter since JavaOne, when he came to visit me in Oregon on his way back)
That's the same Gerald I cite in my online Google slides, who came up with a tetrahedron volume formula very like Euler's, but geared to give output in tetravolumes. I have it in Python.
By comparison, my old offline graphing calculator is a frustrating piece
of work with no QWERTY keyboard.
The issue is the personal workspace (PWS) and providing the ergonomics of at least a cubicle to people that young. Once you're college age, you have a dorm with internet and library study carrels, we hope. But already you're going into debt for that.
Babies don't know how to drive for Uber, if you know what I mean.
I fondly recall forming teams to teach part of a unit to our classroom peers (with professional backup to fill the gaps). Prepare a lesson plan and a non-boring presentation.
Like how will the younger kids ever get the political clout they'll need, to get out of that "locker and tiny desk" rat race (eat lunch the nearby fast food places, how convenient!).
Long term in school suspension features cubicles and autonomy in some districts. John Taylor Gatto has a number of great books about learning vs education.
How will they ever find time to develop a private stash of Jupyter Notebooks in such crowded crushing daycare centers? Might as well be jail.
I should've created a git repo for everything on school day one. {README, LICENSE, ...} GH and GL have free private repos. GL has free CI for private repos. How to reinforce that learning pays off over the short and long term.
At the School of Tomorrow, I assume students are kicked back in private quarters, like in the movie (the kids each have their own room, not just the dome kid).
A captive audience!
In building a table out of a rolling cart, 2x6's, a melamine sheet, and
some brackets, I had need for rigid body dynamics; to determine how much force would cause the table to fall over. After not finding any existing open source software with actual calculations and a few q&a questions with some equations and parameters, I considered trying to add support to FreeCAD (with cadquery and Jupyter Notebook) for rollover risk.
I had a gig sharing CAD online with middle schoolers. Not Blender. Something cloud.
Even the schools using Macs found it slow going. We had Chromebooks as backup.
What was it called again? I'm scanning through a plethora of free online tools and not finding it.
Maybe it was the wifi connection that was slow. I don't think 3D CAD is something you just learn in an hour. The dashboard (GUI) is intimidating, even though this is a "dumbed down" version.
Cadquery + Jupyter Notebook has far less UI to learn (and procedural design) https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery/blob/master/README.md#jupyter https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery/blob/master/README.md#b-exam... The installation could be made easier with a few maintained conda-forge packages and versions pinned in an environment.yml.
We're all free to dream of our castle-in-the-sky curriculum (I certainly do that a lot) wherein the hardware problem has already been solved, but short of turning high rise floor space -- already used for cubicles -- into high schools, I'm not sure how to solve the problem. Making them use itty bitty calculators or tiny computers is designing for claustrophobia.
Maybe VR and BCI? Someday. VNC within VR? In highschool, We had flex classes: schedule n study halls and lectures per week; with computers around the outer edges of the study hall locations. With signup sheets posted on the wall (and no way to follow shared group text messages such as microblogging services)
One laptop per child (a goal, not an achievement yet), leads to a next question: where do you plug it in and get some quality time with it, and the people reachable through it? How do you keep it from being stolen and/or banned in your state? You're relatively little, surrounded by bigger people who always think they know better.
At ~$150+, a Chromebook (with all of the data already in the cloud) is very valuable to its registered owner. There've got to be people somewhere who want to help kids who've had their laptops stolen.
Anyway, I think it's great we get to play with physics engines.
Even Codesters, which I use a lot to teach Python (just signed up for more business), has primitive gravity and bounce effects you can toggle on and off.
Not a full Python implementation (no yield statement, does include classes).
Does codesters have any features for grading? https://www.codesters.com/?lang=en Yup, Codesters has an integrated LMS and automated grading. Can it post grades to e.g. Google Classroom?
Kirby
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 4:12 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, my friend Gerald de Jong was a first adapter of "elastic interval
geometry" where every "rod" is a tension-compression spring governed by mathematics. He put creatures made as tensegrities in a simulation and selected for which was able to walk furthest, of course adding a concept of gravity + friction (traction).
TIL about Tensegrity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity
Good link. I had the distinction of serving as first webmaster for both BFI (bfi.org -- Buckminster Fuller Institute) *and* Kenneth Snelson. https://controlroom.blogspot.com/2008/10/some-prehistory.html He later got a professional to redo his site but said fine to my keeping the original we made together. http://www.grunch.net/snelson/ The two experienced a falling-out and somewhat bitter rivalry after the Black Mountain college collaboration. Something of a coup that I could help bring the two camps closer together. Kenneth gave me one of his originals ('Barrel Tower') which sits here on my desk (pretty small, but too big to go through EWR X-ray, and this was just after 9-11 -- that October -- so they let me walk it through). Kenneth let me stay as a guest a few times. I believe the last time I saw him I brought my daughter to meet him, and also to attend a Best of Friends exhibit at Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. Fond memories. Does codesters have any features for grading?
https://www.codesters.com/?lang=en
Yup, Codesters has an integrated LMS and automated grading. Can it post grades to e.g. Google Classroom?
I've never fully explored all those features, as the after-school meetups I've been leading, either present in person or virtually, are non-graded. We have a place to make notes on what each student is working on, but when I teach remotely, they may be wearing a hoodie and using an alias, i.e. I'm thankfully not in a position to issue grades or even be sure who is whom. However I do make use of the "share and mix" features, similar to MIT Scratch. We create a private "swimming pool" wherein any student can toss (share) project they're working on, not visible to general public, and other students can grab a copy. I can bring up student code on the big screen and discuss it in front of the class, or let them do it. Show & Tell is a big part of learning to code as a group activity. Have students present about their own work, but also observe others commenting on it as well. Helping kids in person is more straightforward as I can just look over their shoulders. That's what I've been doing around Portland, driving around to many campuses, both public and private. It's hard to think of many other jobs that would have given me access to so many different academies. Good opportunity to assess the state of the art. I worked in quite a few Windows labs. A popular Codesters topic is "how do I import pictures I see on the internet and turn them into sprites?". Scratch allows this too. https://www.codesters.com/preview/0da23d529403455092d171134020cc1e/ Scratch is on the whole enjoying a bigger budget and support team is my impression, and is especially capable around sound (writing programs that make music for example). Codesters is not non-auditory. We could go a lot further with some Pythonic world civilizations game... "we" being a team of skilled coders (not just little me writing a few Jupyter Notebooks for other Bucky nut world gamers. :-D). Kirby
On Sunday, June 23, 2019, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 4:12 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes, my friend Gerald de Jong was a first adapter of "elastic interval
geometry" where every "rod" is a tension-compression spring governed by mathematics. He put creatures made as tensegrities in a simulation and selected for which was able to walk furthest, of course adding a concept of gravity + friction (traction).
TIL about Tensegrity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity
Good link.
I had the distinction of serving as first webmaster for both BFI (bfi.org -- Buckminster Fuller Institute) *and* Kenneth Snelson.
https://controlroom.blogspot.com/2008/10/some-prehistory.html
He later got a professional to redo his site but said fine to my keeping the original we made together.
http://www.grunch.net/snelson/
The two experienced a falling-out and somewhat bitter rivalry after the Black Mountain college collaboration. Something of a coup that I could help bring the two camps closer together. Kenneth gave me one of his originals ('Barrel Tower') which sits here on my desk (pretty small, but too big to go through EWR X-ray, and this was just after 9-11 -- that October -- so they let me walk it through).
I grew up in Omaha, NE and the suburbs of St Louis, MO. I don't remember when I leaned about the "Old Man River" proposal to build a dome over all of East St Louis in 1971 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project AFAIU, the Mars 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge entries are all necessarily designed to be built with 3D printing and very little water. IDK if any Fuller or Fuller-esque structures have been incorporated or not http://www.nasa.gov/3DPHab https://youtube.com/results?search_query=Mars+habitat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_habitat#NASA The world's largest glazed geodesic dome protects the year-round desert environment through hot windy summers and cold snowy winters at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Doorly_Zoo_and_Aquarium#Desert_Dome Maybe easier to clean a geodesic dome than a fully-spherical structure. Are geodesic domes as or more resilient than regular domes? https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/geodesic-domes
Kenneth let me stay as a guest a few times. I believe the last time I saw him I brought my daughter to meet him, and also to attend a Best of Friends exhibit at Noguchi Museum in Long Island City. Fond memories.
Does codesters have any features for grading?
https://www.codesters.com/?lang=en
Yup, Codesters has an integrated LMS and automated grading. Can it post grades to e.g. Google Classroom?
I've never fully explored all those features, as the after-school meetups I've been leading, either present in person or virtually, are non-graded.
We have a place to make notes on what each student is working on, but when I teach remotely, they may be wearing a hoodie and using an alias, i.e. I'm thankfully not in a position to issue grades or even be sure who is whom.
Fun! However I do make use of the "share and mix" features, similar to MIT
Scratch.
We create a private "swimming pool" wherein any student can toss (share) project they're working on, not visible to general public, and other students can grab a copy. I can bring up student code on the big screen and discuss it in front of the class, or let them do it.
Like a pastebin app or more of a wiki? If codesters creates a screenshot (and links to them with og:image or schema:image metadata) that'd be cool.
Show & Tell is a big part of learning to code as a group activity. Have students present about their own work, but also observe others commenting on it as well.
The collaborative features of VScode (and CoCalc's LaTeX editor and notebook time slider) may be helpful for remotely helping folks.
Helping kids in person is more straightforward as I can just look over their shoulders. That's what I've been doing around Portland, driving around to many campuses, both public and private. It's hard to think of many other jobs that would have given me access to so many different academies. Good opportunity to assess the state of the art. I worked in quite a few Windows labs.
AFAIU, Windows 10 now includes Python 3.7 in the app store. IDK whether Anaconda or Miniconda are yet also packaged for the Windows app store. I've heard that passing USB keys around with the latest anaconda package set(s) for all 3 platforms works, but some environments are careful about sharing storage media. Something like AcademicTorrents would be quickest when internet bandwidth is limited but users can open a port.
A popular Codesters topic is "how do I import pictures I see on the internet and turn them into sprites?". Scratch allows this too.
https://www.codesters.com/preview/0da23d529403455092d171134020cc1e/
https://octodex.github.com/ The artist who created the original octocat (from a stock image by Simon Oxley) lists his portfolio through Dribbble http://cameronmcefee.com/work/the-octocat/ https://dribbble.com/cameronmcefee
Scratch is on the whole enjoying a bigger budget and support team is my impression, and is especially capable around sound (writing programs that make music for example). Codesters is not non-auditory.
It is most prominent as a performing arts form and a creativity technique centred upon the writing of source code and the use of interactive
I tried to lay down a track with concurrent beats with Scratch one day. It sort of worked. I'll have to try out the Codesters sound support in a lab someday. Here's a gist that shows how to generate headerless waveforms with numpy.sin or scipy.signal and play them back with Audacity: https://thehackerdiary.wordpress.com/2017/06/09/it-is-ridiculously-easy-to-g... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9770073/sound-generation-synthesis-with-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChucK http://chuck.stanford.edu/release/ http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/ https://github.com/Calysto/chuck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding : programming in an improvised way. Live coding is often used to create sound and image based digital media, as well as light systems, improvised dance and poetry,[4][5] though is particularly prevalent in computer music usually as improvisation, although it could be combined with algorithmic composition.[6] Typically, the process of writing source code is made visible by projecting the computer screen in the audience space, with ways of visualising the code an area of active research.[7] Live coding techniques are also employed outside of performance, such as in producing sound for film[8] or audiovisual work for interactive art installations.
We could go a lot further with some Pythonic world civilizations game... "we" being a team of skilled coders (not just little me writing a few Jupyter Notebooks for other Bucky nut world gamers. :-D).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)#Game_designer might have some ideas about this presumably reinforcement-learning based game (with MathTeX, I'm sure) that you speak of. One word: Nbgrader. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2013/03/25/moores-law-vs-wrights-law/
Kirby
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 10:54 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
I grew up in Omaha, NE and the suburbs of St Louis, MO. I don't remember when I leaned about the "Old Man River" proposal to build a dome over all of East St Louis in 1971 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project
Yes, I still weave OMR into my writings and videos as a good example of a mega-project and a "city from scratch" (a giant stadium in shape, terraced on the inside, bleacher seats more like apartment sized), centered around a central "field" big enough to contain several Olympic-sized sports facilities, amusement parks, you name it). It's a design for many cities. I'd focus on making it easy to disassemble, as we might want to take it down and recycle. What would life be like in such a place? Would they use Python or graphing calculators? As a science fiction backdrop, we could create it sooner for the movies than for real, but why not do both? We need places to prototype new lifestyles (e.g. "autonomous vehicles"). Exactly what EPCOT was designed to do (it being a first prototype of such a place, self booting the whole idea of an experimental prototype community of tomorrow (what EPCOT stands for)). I've launched the meme :Asylum City: (a kind of EPCOT) which suggests "a place of refuge" although there's a bit of a "mental hospital" vibe (very Oregon). That's OK. My own neighborhood in Portland is unofficially / informally referred to as the "Asylum District" by many. [Dr.] Hawthorne Blvd, the main street, is named for the doctor who indeed created and ran the first state mental hospital here in Oregon, under contract from Salem. Oregon was later famous for Ken Kesey and 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' -- all good marketing AFAIC (as far as I'm concerned). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey Another famous dome in the STL area, BTW, is of course the Climatron in the STL botanical gardens. I've actually visited that one. I enjoy STL (St. Louis). I don't think I've been to Omaha, only Lincoln. Nebraska was the home state for a planning firm that Libya had contracted with that my dad worked for when we lived in Italy, and I seem to recall driving around Europe with "Cornhusker State" license plates, which everyone would puzzle over. Was it because we got a tax break for being tourists? I don't remember.
The world's largest glazed geodesic dome protects the year-round desert environment through hot windy summers and cold snowy winters at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Doorly_Zoo_and_Aquarium#Desert_Dome
Maybe easier to clean a geodesic dome than a fully-spherical structure. Are geodesic domes as or more resilient than regular domes? https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/geodesic-domes
The most famous geodesic full sphere, to my knowledge, is that one in Disney World's EPCOT, dubbed Spaceship Earth. I see Zurich Zoo has a new geodesic dome elephant house: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/zurich-zoo-elephant-house.html One tends to go spherical when doing a restaurant or lookout "ball in the sky" type design, wherein people want to look down. I'd think floating an aquarium ball on the ocean (tethered, not tippy) over relatively shallow tide pools, might be another application, but I haven't searched yet to see if anyone's doing that. On ordinary land, there's the "sphere as house-wall boundary" and the "sphere as greenhouse boundary with other structures inside" model. The design less tried is the latter, but is closer to Bucky's vision for a mass-produced environmental bubble. The idea is to have your free-standing structures inside the dome, leaving the dome optionally transparent, more like a greenhouse. Privacy and organization is established with theater prop grade internals, meaning you can rearrange the floor plan without serious deconstruction, add steps and remove them. http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/martianmath/mm4.html (Bucky holding container shipping size deliverable as dome home internals e.g. kitchen, media room, loft) http://www.solardome.co.uk/gallery/solardome-pro/ (some models in this direction) As the dome gets bigger, one thinks of small communities, even apartments, scaling up to the "dome over Manhattan" meme. I never took that meme seriously as an actual proposal (more science fiction). The OMR dome, on the other hand, seemed believable, given it's a city from scratch to begin with. With Manhattan, we're talking retrofit. Why not start with a smaller city, like in Simpsons? The accompanying chatter around the NYC poster, was about the relatively big surface:volume ratio of radiator-like high rises, versus what it might cost to keep the whole dome warm, with that more minimalist inside-outside atmospheric interface. Even though the dome is huge, it's exposing less surface area to the outside. We might use a Python Jupyter Notebook, to work it out. When it comes to what's actually practical: these are so many open questions in engineering to some extent, even where they pencil out on paper. That few engineers appear to be testing tomorrow's technologies today is to me another sign of a civilization waiting to happen, that we got to preview. But then we decided we liked the dark ages a lot more for some reason. Nostalgia perhaps, for when Planet Earth seemed more flat. Among those doing the boldest pioneering: the Eden Project has some of the biggest pillow domes (greenhouse concept), which is the design J. Baldwin was working on at the New Alchemy Institute. https://www.edenproject.com/ Here's me talking about dome designs on a Youtube some years ago, at the Linus Pauling House here in Portland: https://youtu.be/QV4m76Om7bk (only about 3 mins, low resolution 240p)
However I do make use of the "share and mix" features, similar to MIT
Scratch.
We create a private "swimming pool" wherein any student can toss (share) project they're working on, not visible to general public, and other students can grab a copy. I can bring up student code on the big screen and discuss it in front of the class, or let them do it.
Like a pastebin app or more of a wiki? If codesters creates a screenshot (and links to them with og:image or schema:image metadata) that'd be cool.
Codesters does create a screenshot thumbnail of what's on the canvas, when you share. The idea of a private classroom is built right in. When students are registered for an account, they're somehow associated with one of these classrooms, by my company (a process I don't see -- never visited the headquarters).
Scratch is on the whole enjoying a bigger budget and support team is my impression, and is especially capable around sound (writing programs that make music for example). Codesters is not non-auditory.
I tried to lay down a track with concurrent beats with Scratch one day. It sort of worked. I'll have to try out the Codesters sound support in a lab someday.
My bad. Typo. "Codesters is not non-auditory." should have been "Codesters is non-auditory." I.E. It has no ability to use sound (yet?). Graphing calculators aren't good at music either. Great links for computer music, thank you. I've dabbled but maybe barked up the wrong tree in terms of software, I now see. Recombining music with math ala the ancient Greek model, via computer music, seems a rich area we could do a lot with. There'd need to be lots of dancing to go with the music too. Great exercise for kids. We don't allow math-music, math-dancing (rhythm, looping, scheduling, scripting) nearly enough in our sit-still regimented graphing calculator schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wright_(game_designer)#Game_designer might have some ideas about this presumably reinforcement-learning based game (with MathTeX, I'm sure) that you speak of. One word: Nbgrader.
Great link. I think about SimCity a lot. My daughter grew up playing Sims quite a bit. The simulations I imagine are designed to be much more about actual real systems, like the water reservoirs around LA. Did you know the main reservoir is coated with a layer of black plastic balls (called "shade balls"), less to prevent evaporation than to prevent the formation of bromate from chlorine? https://youtu.be/uxPdPpi5W4o (yay sphere packing as a topic! -- I use Python to explore sphere packing: 1, 12, 42, 92...). The open source ethic applies to sharing about public infrastructure with those destined to depend on it. All of us in other words.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimhandy/2013/03/25/moores-law-vs-wrights-law/
Both laws examples of what Fuller called "ephemeralization" (doing more with less materials as a function of experience / understanding). Toynbee (historian): "etherealization" (same thing). As one (a person, humanity, whatever) gains mastery over the principles, the physical component tends to shrink. Who gets the benefit of the added leisure time (slack) is the question, i.e. time for elective versus mandatory activities. That benefit doesn't seem to spread to all Global U student-faculty very evenly. More to simulate! Get out your Jupyter Notebooks and search for relevant data! Curate. Analyze. Visualize. Kirby
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:28 AM C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kirby,
I think kids should write their own plotting routines to graph their functions starting anywhere 3rd-7th grade.
If they wish to, yes, so many optional branches. I'm coasting along using everyday office productivity tools that make use of code, scripts, nevertheless. But since when in school does a kid get an office, a place to focus on anything like coding? In math class, you get a tiny desk, rows and columns, book open. The calculator is designed to fit on that desk, and be a part of that whole dynamic. Very cramped ergonomics. I question the ethics (= aesthetics). The status quo has grown stale. In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you
can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff. AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
-Charlie
Yes, that's one way to teach that stuff. I'm for continuing to curate content for the various audiences. Some students love Coding Train and I can see why. I've spent some hours with it myself. Lots of great teachers out there! My current project (from whence that calculator page) is a take-off on the movie 'The House of Tomorrow' wherein the star kid is being raised by his Nana to be the next Buckminster Fuller. Of course I'm intrigued, given RBF and Ludwig Wittgenstein (LW) were two philosophers I've seriously studied. We all have our hobbies, right? However, as usual with a fictional work, or even with most documentaries on the guy (not all): there's zero attention given the actual substance i.e. the "whole number volumes table" (a meme). In a 90 minute drama based on a fictional work, there's no time to look at an actual curriculum (our star is home schooled, but what is he learning? -- we have no clue, nice dome though -- tourists come check it out, set in the pre-internet era). 'The School of Tomorrow' is my Github repo designed to provide this missing puzzle piece, and add back the missing realism. [1] I explain it all on the videos. Kirby [1] https://youtu.be/UpEJysjcLBY (recounting the genesis of the project)
Yes that must be disappointing if 'The House of Tomorrow' didn't convey or do justice to the content of his work. On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:50 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:28 AM C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kirby,
I think kids should write their own plotting routines to graph their functions starting anywhere 3rd-7th grade.
If they wish to, yes, so many optional branches.
I'm coasting along using everyday office productivity tools that make use of code, scripts, nevertheless.
But since when in school does a kid get an office, a place to focus on anything like coding?
In math class, you get a tiny desk, rows and columns, book open.
The calculator is designed to fit on that desk, and be a part of that whole dynamic.
Very cramped ergonomics. I question the ethics (= aesthetics). The status quo has grown stale.
In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you
can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP, ... all kinds of stuff. AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting software.
-Charlie
Yes, that's one way to teach that stuff. I'm for continuing to curate content for the various audiences. Some students love Coding Train and I can see why. I've spent some hours with it myself. Lots of great teachers out there!
My current project (from whence that calculator page) is a take-off on the movie 'The House of Tomorrow' wherein the star kid is being raised by his Nana to be the next Buckminster Fuller.
Of course I'm intrigued, given RBF and Ludwig Wittgenstein (LW) were two philosophers I've seriously studied. We all have our hobbies, right?
However, as usual with a fictional work, or even with most documentaries on the guy (not all): there's zero attention given the actual substance i.e. the "whole number volumes table" (a meme).
In a 90 minute drama based on a fictional work, there's no time to look at an actual curriculum (our star is home schooled, but what is he learning? -- we have no clue, nice dome though -- tourists come check it out, set in the pre-internet era).
'The School of Tomorrow' is my Github repo designed to provide this missing puzzle piece, and add back the missing realism. [1]
I explain it all on the videos.
Kirby
[1] https://youtu.be/UpEJysjcLBY (recounting the genesis of the project)
-- ccosse.github.io
On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:40 PM C. Cossé <ccosse@gmail.com> wrote:
Yes that must be disappointing if 'The House of Tomorrow' didn't convey or do justice to the content of his work.
Oh no, it was a fine movie. Thumbs up. I'm fully understanding that a fictional audience that has to earn its keep in popcorn sales is not a didactic work. I'm just saying that left me an opening, in which to insert my more thorough and demystifying treatment of what that kid in the movie would have needed to learn. There's a scene where he gets hired as the geometry tutor for the kid his own age with the heart transplant and cool sister. The supposition is he's all up on that stuff because he lives in a dome and his Nana is a Bucky nut. That's fine as a plot element, but in my version we're making what he teaches his teen peer far more subversive of the status quo than what's in that Euclid book. Anyway, the punk tie-in (they form a band) is perfect as punk let to cyber punk and kids knowing RSA (seemed pretty futuristic at the time, what with that starting out as all secret and all). I've got that component. Number Theory is making a come back, even as Linear Algebra is enjoying a renaissance (machine learning). We look at all that in our School of Tomorrow. :-D (emoji too, not just emoticons) 👸 ♔ 🐼 Kirby
After K-12 years of compulsory math education, no-one (no-one!) taught me that there are CAS (Computer Algebra Systems) like SymPy and Sage; other than that better calculators are not allowed because that's an unfair advantage. Simplified cost and revenue models with fixed and variable expenses may be an ideal way to introduce CAS. Solve for break-even in terms of n years or months. Does pyodide work well with minimal software deployment or centralized resources for hosting a JupyterHub server that hosts preconfigured docker containers? (Pyodide compiles Python and C to WebAssembly so that it runs at near-native speed with no installation) https://github.com/iodide-project/pyodide
Pyodide brings the Python runtime to the browser via WebAssembly, along with NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, parts of SciPy, and NetworkX
Pyodide Demo: https://alpha.iodide.io/notebooks/300/ On Sunday, June 23, 2019, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
This year: https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_ Tomorrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb
That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right? Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse (idiom).
Kirby
On 24/06/19 6:08 AM, kirby urner wrote:
Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
The surprise here is that kids still buy calculators. Can't 'everything' be done on their ubiquitous smart-phones? -- Regards =dn
participants (4)
-
C. Cossé -
DL Neil -
kirby urner -
Wes Turner