[Edu-sig] python4edu by animation -- best choice?

[kirby urner]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 2:04 AM, Jurgis Pralgauskis
<jurgis.pralgauskis at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> You know, kids like effects,
> and if they can program effects,
> they like programming :)
>
> the good overview of tools is
> http://livingcode.org/2008/the-importance-of-visual-programming
>

Yes, this is useful.  I agree with Dethe when he writes:

"So far, while I like the ideas behind Smalltalk, I haven't been able
to muster much enthusiasm for Squeak. It's always been slow on the Mac
(the Macs I have now are finally fast enough to make it bearable), and
the UI for it is downright ugly."

A little more diplomatic than how I put it (re the UI).

> there I found a new (for me) tool Nodebox -- similar to processing.org
> - the output is much nicer than turtle, and can export SVG, PDF, PNG
> - the great idea for experimentation to have code window side to canvas.
>

http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Evolution uses Nodebox, looks cool,
maybe one of my sponsors will toss me a Mac one of these days so I can
join that party.

>
>
> ps.: does anybody know if jython works with processing.org?
>
> --
> Jurgis Pralgauskis
> Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;)
> http://sagemath.visiems.lt

We need to learn more about Sage, keep bringing it up at PPUG meetings
(Portland Python) because Sage HQS is nearby Seattle, also actively
into Python (more button-down corporate up there, people showing up in
teams from their high tech companies).

<rant content="political">

As I was writing to Ian (tizard.stanford.edu, Pycon), the gaping hole
in the culture right now is the lay press i.e. journalism.

We're wrestling with all these issues of how to pass on the culture (a
big job for any civilization, especially a high tech one) and the
newspapers are no help whatsoever, because journalists don't know how
to get a handle on any of the relevant stories I guess.

I stopped getting The Oregonian given how utterly useless it's being,
buy a copy now and then to see if anything has changed.  Nada.

There's no technical savvy in newspaper culture except for Django
(that's what they could write about, but I bet they won't -- real
estate market owns the newspapers, obsesses about mortgages until the
cows come home, whereas our Medal of Freedom winning polyhedral
geometer, source of much Pythonic math, was all about liberating
ourselves from waterboarding by the mortgage industry -- which is why
newspapers only call him a failure, no matter how many degrees,
patents, awards, medals.... (talk about dumb!))

http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2009/03/storyboarding-tomorrow.html
(retro futurism, still on the table)

http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2008/06/poor-slob-bucky-psb.html
(response to art community surge of interest)

http://mail.geneseo.edu/pipermail/math-thinking-l/2009-March/001310.html
(what we teach in Portland because we're not totally brain-dead, even
if the newspapers are).

http://coffeeshopsnet.blogspot.com/2009/02/in-news.html  (me in the
newspaper over 20 years ago)

</rant>

Kirby

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