[Edu-sig] CIGS

[Arthur Siegel]

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Attached is some information I sent to

http://forum.swarthmore.edu/dynamic/

informing them of my own activities and that of CP4E.

The general efforts at forum.swathmore.edu are making its (good) influence
felt.
My 9 year-old nephew is actively involved with one of their programs . I'm
not
sure how he found it.

ART

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I have a contribution-in-progress, I hope, to the world of dynamic =
geometry software. =20

It is written in Python  http://www.python.org/ and rendered by OpenGL.  =


I built it primarily to support my own efforts to visualize and =
understand=20
on a more intuitive level Projective Geometry concepts, but have come to =
see=20
it as having broader potential.

I believe in concept, design at least - it brings the possibilities of =
dynamic
geometry software in education a notch forward.

The potentially most innovative thing about PyGeo is the use of Python - =

a full featured OOP language, but with a simplified syntax.  The main =
developer=20
behind Python is currently devoting his energies to focus Python's =
potential as=20
a first programming language - a project called CP4E (Computer =
Programming for Everybody).=20
The project (see at http://www.python.org/sigs/edu-sig/ )might be of =
general interest to the=20
Math Forum and I encourage you to check it out.

Using Python in creating dynamic geometry software allows for a better =
integration of=20
synthetic and analytic concepts - the analytics in the algorithms =
driving the software
are readily exposed, given a basic grasp of OOP. In fact a presentation =
of the basics of OOP=20
could (and should) be part of a curriculum that used PyGeo. =20

All this assumes, by the way, that the potential for performance =
optimization is purposefully=20
sacrificed in the interest of coding transparency.

I think it alls ties together wonderfully and can't help but be excited =
about it.

I don't see why in its simplest form it could not be useful at the =
elementary school level.=20
On the other hand I am exploring college level concepts with it.

My own background is liberal arts.=20

I know from my own education that traditional geometry and symbolic math =
were never really tied=20
together for me. From my liberal arts perspective, I believe that the =
importance of developing this=20
integration transcends the subject matter of math (as narrowly defined). =
Which is probably why the=20
entire field of dynamic geometry is so exciting to me - and why I am =
excited about the possibility of
 contributing to it.

At this point PyGeo is all my own effort (derived and inspired, without =
question, from the efforts of
others), and there are certainly limitations in the design and =
execution.=20

But it is fully OpenSource. I am hoping to interest folks in getting =
into it and improving it.

You can check out a page I did about it at =
http://courses.soe.umich.edu/pygeo/

I hope to redo the page and put the distribution in better shape before =
I try to give it much exposure. =20
At this point I mostly wanted to give a heads up and see if you might =
have any preliminary comments, ideas.



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