Warren, Your book looks great! I'd be interested in seeing the rest of it. Yeah, we ended up discussing how to represent a deck of cards in class as well. One of the kids got inspired while creating the dice simulation and emailed me asking how to do something like that. So I was really glad to see this start growing organically. We haven't discussed classes previously, as that would REALLY have scared them off, so I just had him continue at the level of simple lists, thinking of cards as simple ordered pairs:
suits = ['S', 'H', 'D', 'C'] ranks = ['A', 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 'J', 'Q', 'K'] deck = [(rank, suit) for suit in suits for rank in ranks] shuffle(deck) hand = [deck.pop() for card in range(5)]
He played around with this and really got into it. Good news! It's amazing how much you can do in a simple interactive way with Python. I mean, this LOOKS like what you do with a deck! But I did try to sow some seeds by mentioning how you could accomplish even more by thinking in terms of functions and classes. - Michel On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Warren Sande <warren.sande@rogers.com>wrote:
Michel,
Sounds like you caught their interest, which is great. I have a chapter on probability and simulation in my book, "Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners". It talks about simulating dice, coins, and a deck of cards. In the second half of the chapter we make a Crazy Eights card game (text-based). I've attached a preview of the chapter if you want to have a look. Keep in mind that this is one of the later chapters, and we have already covered the basics like loops, lists, objects, etc.
By the way, the book has had some delays in production, but it should be out in the next few weeks.
Regards, Warren Sande
------------------------------ *From:* michel paul <mpaul213@gmail.com> *To:* "edu-sig@python.org" <edu-sig@python.org> *Sent:* Thursday, February 5, 2009 1:34:49 PM *Subject:* [Edu-sig] probability & simulation
We began a unit in math called 'Probability and Simulation'. The students of course have to solve many typical problems involving dice and coins. This provided a perfect opportunity for incorporating Python in a way that didn't freak the kids out. Remember, I have been trying to weave Python into a math environment where programming is seen as something alien and scary. Bizarre. The 'choice' function in the random library provides an excellent way to create all kinds of simulations very easily. I used this as an example in class:
coin = ['Heads - I win', 'Tails - you lose']
tosses = [choice(coin) for toss in range(1000)]
It was great. Very easy to understand. This combined with the 'count' method in a list, and I could go ahead and assign them a little HW project to create a frequency table for throwing 2 dice 10,000 times. I told them to just experiment, copy and paste their Shell session and email it to me. It worked very well. Even a lot of the kids who have been resistant to this Python stuff could handle it. Didn't require having to write functions - purely interactive.
Then the next day we explored tetrahedral and other kinds of dice.
Very simple, and it seemed to work well. There's a section at the end of the chapter that describes creating simulations using BASIC. Ha! We did this on the very first day!
- Michel
2009/2/6 michel paul <mpaul213@gmail.com>:
Warren,
Your book looks great! I'd be interested in seeing the rest of it. Yeah, we ended up discussing how to represent a deck of cards in class as well. One of the kids got inspired while creating the dice simulation and emailed me asking how to do something like that. So I was really glad to see this start growing organically. We haven't discussed classes previously, as that would REALLY have scared them off, so I just had him continue at the level of simple lists, thinking of cards as simple ordered pairs:
suits = ['S', 'H', 'D', 'C'] ranks = ['A', 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 'J', 'Q', 'K'] deck = [(rank, suit) for suit in suits for rank in ranks] shuffle(deck) hand = [deck.pop() for card in range(5)]
Good stuff. I'm always tempted to have 'S','H','D','C' replaced by the actual symbols (DejaVu font?), keeping the quote marks as these symbols don't qualify as identifiers, only strings. Here's the relevant page from the Unicode charts. http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf Let's see what I can do with Python here...
import unicodedata heart = chr(0x2665) unicodedata.name(heart) 'BLACK HEART SUIT'
I thought hearts were red... I've uploaded a screen shot using these characters in IDLE/Py3K: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157315@N00/3259871142/ Also, I've finally gotten around to getting my I Ching stuff ported to a Google appengine: http://osgarden.appspot.com Lots of Chinese characters, though not top-level (this is Python 2.5 anyway -- see About page for source). Yes, I use Justin's PyFontify with py2html, colorize code on the fly (had to modify py2html a little).
He played around with this and really got into it. Good news! It's amazing how much you can do in a simple interactive way with Python. I mean, this LOOKS like what you do with a deck! But I did try to sow some seeds by mentioning how you could accomplish even more by thinking in terms of functions and classes.
- Michel
Yes, REPL is what kids like, though they don't call it REPL (read, evaluate, print loop -- what the interpreter does). I might try EDSL for "eat, digest, say loop" -- you could think of others. In the 1980s the paradigm with BASIC etc. was "write a little program and prompt yourself for inputs" (ala raw_input), but it's easier at first to just work in a session, more like in Logo and APL, cluttering up the workspace (i.e. __main__) with all kinds of remembered stuff. Play around, then cut and paste we you want to keep for next time, some exceptions and debugging already happening interactively. We don't start by writing then running programs, we start by talking to the interpreter, importing existing libraries, poking around. When we we start saving stuff, we think of our first files more like the math library, or string, i.e. a box of tools that we use directly. The math module has no raw_input prompts -- that'd be silly. So our first saved .py files aren't "programs", they're "modules". They may have unit tests or doc tests, should at least have documentation of some kind, but there's no need for a main() or any unifying structure. It's not a "script", it's a "bag of useful things" (a namespace). Some functions, some classes, even some constants maybe... KIrby
On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 9:47 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote: Here's the relevant page from the Unicode charts.
http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf
Let's see what I can do with Python here...
import unicodedata heart = chr(0x2665)
Ha! This will be a lot of fun when we get back to class. Yeah, I remember your Ching stuff, but at the time I hadn't yet explored 3.0. I figured I'd eventually get around to things like Unicode, but, wow, this is incredibly easy. Why wait? Little details like this can be gems. Thanks. - Michel
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kirby urner -
michel paul