[Baypiggies] current topic schedule for February, March, and April

[Edward Cherlin]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 9:36 AM, jim <jim at well.com> wrote:
>
> Beginning February 26 and for some months afterward,
> baypiggies will meet at the Symantec Vcafe at
> 350 Ellis Street, Mountain View, CA 94043
>
>
> At this time, meeting topics appear to be:
>
> February 26: The Factory Module, by Pete Fein
> possible additional talk on PyDev
>
> March 26: Tools Night, coordinated by Simeon Franklin
>
> April 23: Possibly: Alternatives for Writing C and C++
> Extensions for Computer Vision Research, by Dameon Eads
>
>
>
> --------------------------------------
>
> Here are suggestions for newbie nugget and main talk
> topics. please reply if you want the topic presented
> and especially if you can present the topic. please
> reply: your replies help a lot.
>
>
> newbie nugget suggestions:
> decorators
> current buzzwords
> wxPython
> other?
>
>
> main talk suggestions:
> IEEE-488/GPIB instrument automation

Data acquisition and analysis are important for the Measure Activity
on the XO. It provides a digital oscilloscope function in both time
and frequency domain. We plan to extend it from just taking data from
the sound port to any USB instruments, and piping data to any analysis
programs, which could be a spreadsheet or a SciPy data analysis and
visualization Activity.

> Any type of GUI programming
> threading
> stack manipulation module (e.g. greenlet)
> py 3k

At some point it will be necessary to convert all the parts of Sugar
that are in Python to py 3k.

> XO sugar programming

I and Walter Bender are working on creating several different variants
of Turtle Art with programming tiles that can illustrate a wide range
of math and Computer Science concepts. For example, the current set
uses infix arithmetic, but provides no parentheses. We should create
prefix tiles, following the structure of Logo. There are many other
possibilities. Defining new tiles is part graphical design and part
fairly simple Python programming. Walter is also adapting Turtle Art
to building presentations.

We have a wide-ranging request for about 10,000 education modules from
Open Learning Exchange Nepal (olenepal.org). Earth Treasury and others
are working with them on determining which topics should have
priority, and how they can best be implemented. There will be a
competition among proponents of Smalltalk, Logo, Python, APL, and
other languages to provide the best tools for constructing the
learning modules and the digital textbooks that we are beginning to
design.

> django
> REST representational state transfer
> Restful text in Python26 (restructured text)
> doctest
> Web programming (CherryPy? Pylons? <framework buzzword here>)
> abstract classes
> other?

We need to move on from Pippy, a fairly crude Sugar Activity for
introducing Python programmng that my son and I demonstrated to
BayPiggies last year, to a decent IDE and serious teaching materials.
I can put people into contact with those working on both of these
ideas. There are books on how to introduce programming to third
graders using other languages. I think we can beat that.
-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/User:Mokurai