[Edu-sig] simple guessing games

[kirby urner]

> My curriculum is more plane than plain, and gives some weight to the
> point that 3 points uniquely determine one.  But that is a different
> story entirely.

At this point I'm willing to just watch you and your crew (?) steer as
you will, flying the Python Nation flag, the CP4E banner, both or
neither -- your call.

I don't want your help steering my ship, no.  I wouldn't consider you
qualified in any way, given your strong bias against our late captain.
 I prefer a more congenial working atmosphere, like I have today.

So if we can cut down on the noise level:  I promise to not mention
__ribs__ on this edu-sig too often, since mostly I'm teaching Python
live, face to face, in real classrooms, and can do it there with wild
abandon.  Observing faculty tend to see merit in my approach and adopt
some of its elements (maybe the __ribs__, maybe not -- their call).

However, if some new subscriber comes along and asks "how do you
handle special name methods?" I'll likely pop up and say:  I use this
__rib__ mnemonic and teach it quite early as we require familiarity
with operator overriding to implement our vector type, our integers
modulo N type, our other math object types (but before that, we do
more warm fuzzy stuff, with Dog and Monkey, subclasses of Mammal (and
they have ribs too, e.g. __init__ and __repr__)).  Primitive
collection types also have them, as do the number types (float, int,
decimal...).

You, in turn, should feel free to peddle your obscure and outmoded
ideas about geometry, which I'm sure some will appreciate, but quite
frankly, I'm not a Euclidean (even if I respect him, and use "his"
algorithm -- it's his axioms I don't really need nor make extensive
use of (which does *not* mean I have to keep my hands off the trig, so
don't try that again (unless you want more noise))).

Where I think we have something in common is neither of us just wants
to exclusively focus on legal minors, small people too young to vote.
I love 'em, but Python is for grownups too.  So if you're aiming your
geometry at an adult clientelle, then we're likely to overlap in the
region of VPython, where already I'm famous for Hypertoons (a big hit
at Pycon and OSCON), and for First Person Physics (my main link to
Bruce Sherwood and Ruth Chabay is through Bob Fuller emeritus,
University of Nebraska (a different Fuller, and a different kind of
genius)).

Kirby