[Edu-sig] some success

[David MacQuigg]

At 10:29 PM 9/12/2008 -0700, michel paul wrote:

>The first homework assignment in my math classes this year was to download and install Python.  I've been using it most extensively in my FST (Functions Statistics Trig) class.

Sounds like the same class I took as a high school Junior in 1963.  It was all pretty new at the time, right after a major revision in the curriculum.  We need another Sputnik!!!

>After class I asked the kid if what we were doing made any sense, and he was beaming.  He said yes, and he couldn't wait to get home to download Python.  That was very encouraging.

I remember laboriously making a plot of sin(x) on a large sheet of graph paper, using values from tables in a big book.  This wasn't an assignment.  I just enjoyed doing it.  I remember thinking - where do sine waves come from?  Do generators really make sine waves?  Seems like parabolas would be simpler.

If only I could have applied that energy and enthusiasm to learning the fundamentals of computing ...  Instead my introduction to computing a few years later was truly awful.  It wasn't considered a subject worthy of study at Caltech.  Now after a long career in engineering, I'm learning some basic computer science by helping with classes at U of A.

>What I want the kids and colleagues and administration to understand is that this is not something on top of the algebra, this IS algebra!  It's algebra that RUNS.  It's 21st century algebra.

I like your presentation of list comprehensions as set notation.  It helped me see the utility of the syntax, and appreciate its compactness.  I was thinking of list comprehensions as just another twist I had to learn to read other people's programs.  Now when I see one, I don't have to parse it in my mind to understand it, and I use them all the time.

This also seems like a good way to squeeze some computing into an otherwise orthodox curriculum.  It's just a tool for doing algebra, not a frontal assault on the status quo.  If Python gets a foothold at U of A, it will likely be just a tool to do some simulations in an advanced networking class.  Learning Python is easier than learning OPNET.  Oh, and by the way, it's not just a network simulation language.  It's useful in just about everything you will do involving computation!

Keep up the good work!