[Edu-sig] Re: Introductory high school programming

[Scott David Daniels]

Kirby Urner wrote:
> I'm finally making the time to work with VPython again.  My previous high on
> that score was reading Arthur's Pygeo code (many versions ago) and trying to
> see how it all worked.  These days, I'm just adapting what I've used to
> output to POV-Ray, and a lot of the same code over top.
You might want to check out Ruth Chabay's code to emit POV-Ray code from
a VPython scene.  It is a little rough (I tried cleaning it up a bit
once but abandoned the attempt before I got a really good slice of a
torus), but could be the basis of a good movie preview setup that will
let you tweak your movie viewpoints.
> 
> A motivation is 'Teaching Python with Graphics', which I'm suppose to
> present 45 minutes on at OSCON end of July.  I'm planning to use my
> not-so-fancy laptop (1.2 Duron Compaq Presario 700) running Linux 2.4
> (Mandrake 9.2) and Python 2.3, and graphics libraries (PIL, PyGame,
> VPython).  
> 
> The focus is on smallish projects involving graphics and Python programming.
> For example, awhile back I posted re some of that Wolfram-style cellular
> automata stuff, using POV-Ray for output.  I've since adapted that to PIL.  
> 
> On the POV-Ray side, I do want to demo simple animation-building, though I
> haven't yet moved the whole stills-to-movie process to Linux (however, I'm
> confidant mplayer will both build and play the stuff).


-Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org