[Edu-sig] Re: Teaching graphics with Python (was Introductoryhigh school programming)

[Kirby Urner]

> From: edu-sig-bounces at python.org [mailto:edu-sig-bounces at python.org] On
> Behalf Of John Zelle
> Sent: Saturday, May 08, 2004 10:56 AM
> To: Kirby Urner; edu-sig at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Re: Teaching graphics with Python (was
> Introductory high school programming)

> For those of you working with VPython, if you've not tried it out yet,
> take a look at the stereoscopic mode. I contributed the main code for
> this in the fall of 2003. It's a spin-off from some VR work I've been
> doing with my students. The stereo mode allows you to take virtually any
> VPython program and turn it into true stereographic 3D. You can make the
> objects seem to jump right out of the screen at you. The stereo graphics
> are viewable in a variety of modes, but the really neat part is that you
> can do it with no special equipment at all. Just set the stereo mode to
> 'redblue' and you can use the cheap red-blue glasses that come with kids
> books and happy meals (and are used for viewing Mars photos). You can
> buy these glasses in bulk for pennies a piece and show true 3D programs
> to a roomful of people using a standard LCD projector. Kids love this!
> 
> Typically, making a program stereoscopic is as simple as doing:
> scene.stereo = 'redblue'


Hi John --

I wanted to thank you for this stereoscopic feature in VPython, and
suggestion that I use it.

I was sitting in Robin Dunn's tutorial on wxPython this Tuesday at OSCON
when your suggestion drifted into my consciousness.  I googled (OSCON had
wifi) and lo and behold, found a 3D stereoscopy club and even a 3D *museum*
right here in Portland ( http://www.cascade3d.org/ ).  I emailed a guy and
within 36 hours I had a whole stack of precisely those cheap red/blue
glasses you described.

I demoed quite a few things during my 45 minute talk, in addition to running
through a bunch of slides in OpenOffice.  The 3D thing came towards the end,
and the audience (full room) went "ooooo" as the rhombic triacontahedron
floated in front of them on the large screen, and "ahhhhhhh" as I rotated it
and zoomed in to it.

I also showed our cellular automata work using your graphics.py, which I
mentioned, as well as holding up your book and talking about how important
this was in the education side of things.

My slides are here:
http://www.4dsolutions.net/oscon2004/ (might be some minor problems if
viewed in Windows, not sure (tried to make it work well in both, but kept
finding little discrepancies going back and forth, and did all last minute
editing on the Linux side)).

People came up afterwards, and for the rest of the conference, saying how
much they liked my talk.  One guy said he was now persuaded to do Python in
his CS1 next year (most of those present were not educators, but some
advised on the side -- Dana Moore falls in this category (he showcased
Python in Eclipse, so far mostly coded by :
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2004/view/e_spkr/524 )

The day before, I had a Middle Eastern lunch with your publisher, Jim Leisy
(had never met him before) and Kevin Altis (main author of PythonCard and
co-chair of the Python track at OSCON).

Other highlights of the conference (from my point of view):

---

Jim Hugunin showed the benchmarks for IronPython on the .NET framework --
it's working out very well (slower on Mono, but that project has more
optimization to do).  Jim starts work for Microsoft on Monday, so it'll be
interesting to see under what terms further IronPython versions get out to
our community

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2004/view/e_sess/5120

---

GvR's State of Python address introduced us to decorators, which offer a
syntactic replacement for mymethod = staticmethod(mymethod) semantics in a
class.  He's going with @ (at sign), which he agrees looks unPythonic, but
on the other hand there are good reasons for not inventing new key words.
He knows this is controversial and is prepared to rip it out or change it if
the community goes bananas.  Decorators should be in the next alpha release
of 2.4.

He also talked about the new generator comprehensions and some of the
subtleties involving late binding which could confuse people (more on that
in a next post).  

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2004/view/e_sess/4981

---

Alex Martelli gave a sophisticated presentation on Design Patterns, and as
this preceded my talk, I was able to use 'façade' as a part of my patter (I
build a façade, an adapter which limits the back end interface, into
POV-Ray, VPython and the like).

The other highlight re Alex was he and Anna just got married and shared
slides and music from this event during the Lightning Talks.

---

Michel Pelletier's talk overlapped a lot with Alex's.  It was less about
Zope3 and more about the importance of interfaces and adapters in Zope, PEAK
and Twisted.  He made a strong argument for bring interfaces into the syntax
of Python in some way, so that Python would be able to compete effectively
on these new multi-language VMs (.NET, Mono and Parrot).

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2004/view/e_sess/5298

---

I already mentioned the Python-in-Eclipse work, which is still beta, but
coming along nicely.

Andy McKay and Joel Burton did a very effective job presenting about Plone
this time.  Joel covered all the basics in a half day tutorial, and Andy
focused on Archetypes, a technology for defining new data types within Plone
without having to code too much.  Andy, who has a new book out on Plone
(Apress: http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=335 ), is the chief
organizer behind VanPy (Python conference in Vancouver, BC) which starts
like today or tomorrow.  I'm not able to attend.

Kirby