Re: [Edu-sig] interactive python tutorial online (as tryruby)
try ruby! is pretty enticing, I agree, great use of AJAX to refresh the cue cards at bottom. Might be a fun Django project (I assume this is Rails?). I rarely have the challenge to initiate an interest in Python, as by the time students have entered my class, studies the class description, they've made up their minds. Some of them have already checked it out or used it in other classes. Here's my current course description for Spring (written by Gail, other staff): ==== Computer Animation Programming Supercharge your programming skills as you learn the software Star Wars animators, Google engineers, and game designers use to make their projects a success! You will develop your Python skills using simple vector-based geometry in an object-oriented approach. You'll get hands-on experience with POV-Ray, a full-featured ray tracer that can create stunning photo-realistic computer-generated images and animations and experiment in VPython, a real-time game-like environment. Other topics include data structures, classes and objects, control statements, and reading and writing files. ==== I also don't work with children under 15 for the most part, and these days am lucky to see anyone under 25 (I'm not a full time classroom teacher, just venture there from my private sector perch in the private sector). I should remember my limited experience, as a former high school math teacher in Jersey City, as an application developer. I am not a preschool specialist or administrator, although I did at one time evaluate products aimed at this market for McGraw-Hill (a long time ago). Kirby Urner @ Fine Grind (CFN) Portland, Oregon On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 12:21 AM, Jurgis Pralgauskis <jurgis.pralgauskis@gmail.com> wrote:
also would be a good to have interactive tutorial, which would comunicate with user/learner in similar manner as tryruby... or maybe more advanced chatbot..
import intro or learn, teachmeintro
maybe smb knows of similar initiatives ? and which text tutorial would you propose? I'd like it to be short kind of python in 5/10 minutes: http://www.poromenos.org/tutorials/python http://jamwt.com/misc/pyten.txt
maybe smb knows of similar initiatives ?
googling around found http://www.python-visual-sandbox.de/ another thing which I am curiuos about -- visualization: python is quite visual itself, but for CS intro its quite common to use flowcharts there's nice tool for two-way software Visustin (free demo) http://www.aivosto.com/visustin/sample/gcd-python.html one way: weird flowchart -> py (opensource) http://www.pygame.org/project/355/ also something similar to flowcharts - Vision (seems kind of opensource) http://mgltools.scripps.edu/packages/vision does anybody know of py -> flowchart (opensource)? I imagine it could be done with ast module similary as http://blog.prashanthellina.com/2007/11/14/generating-call-graphs-for-unders... or http://pycallgraph.slowchop.com/
On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 10:43 AM, Jurgis Pralgauskis <jurgis.pralgauskis@gmail.com> wrote:
maybe smb knows of similar initiatives ?
googling around found http://www.python-visual-sandbox.de/
Excellent set of visualizations, although I bailed just now on recursive Fibonaccis, a reflex as that's so not the right way to do it (but hey, the author is teaching recursion, so my problem not his). "I'll be back" (Gov. of California voice). I especially liked the one about lists and pointers, as it hearkens back to recent long threads right here on edu-sig about how to best visualize what's happening in: s = [1] t = [s, s, s] for ele in t: ele[0] += 1
print(t) [[4], [4], [4]]
(one of the examples, updated to Py3). That you get to watch more than one visualization and then "vote" is so focus group. The more Pythonic visualizations seem to come later (numbers too are objects, a = 1, then a = 2 is repointing name 'a', b = a means another name for the same object... Probably the whole notion of reference counting and garbage collection is a good place to dive into the system language implementation when the time comes? Copying is "discouraged" in Python because of the "heavyweight objects" and "lightweight names" model: i.e. could easily be very expensive to copy (and why did you need two of the same thing in the first place?), memory-wise, so "a = b" doesn't mean that, and adding lots of names is very low overhead. In my Saturday Academy class, a typical object is "a bulldozer" or "a train" in a somewhat literal sense, in that I'm having them imagining puppeting their sandbox toys via some AJAXy eyecandy or whatever (a mental exercise), except now they're not just sandbox toys anymore, but the real deal. Oh, and the regular expressions thing (first one) -- fantastic. Michael Weigend is a talented artist. I thank you for sharing this link, will be shopping it around to my teachers. Kirby
participants (2)
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Jurgis Pralgauskis -
kirby urner