[Edu-sig] Announcement: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist -- Interactive Edition

[Sarina Canelake]

Hi Carl,

I am a master's student, and for my project I am building an interactive
Python tutor system, hopefully with 150-250 problems, as well as embedded
video. Some of my inspirations have been the Khan Academy and codingbat.

I'm beta testing the tutor in a course I teach over MIT's IAP period
(January term) and I hope to be releasing it as a free product through MIT's
Open CourseWare by next summer.

Currently the problems are for Python 2.7.x, as that's what we use in the
EECS department here. If it seems like more people are transitioning to
Python 3, I can potentially release a second version of the tutor that uses
a Python 3 interpreter.

Regards,
Sarina

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 10:07 PM, Carl Cerecke <carl at free.org.nz> wrote:

> Looks good. Nice work.
>
> How about exercises in a similar style to codingbat.com? That would be
> really valuable I think.
>
> Cheers,
> Carl.
>
> On 27 August 2011 02:23, Brad Miller <millbr02 at luther.edu> wrote:
>
>>  Hello,
>>
>> As part of my Sabbatical this past year I've been working on a new edition
>> of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (by Elkner et. al) with my
>> colleague David Ranum.  The idea behind this new edition is to make it
>> interactive, to encourage students to learn by doing and to explore.  The
>> three main features we've added to previous editions are:
>>
>>    - Videos:  Each section has (or will have) a 5-10 minute screencast
>>    explaining the written concepts verbally.
>>    - Interactive Python interpreter.  Using Skulpt -- an open source
>>    javascript implementation of Python.
>>    - Codelens code visualizer -- Based on the Online Python Tutor by
>>    Philip Guo this element allows students to step forward and backward through
>>    the code and to see the values of variables
>>
>> To make it easy to add these features I wrote 3 new sphinx directives, so
>> adding the interactive code features is not onerous.  When we finish our
>> last pass through the book, we'll make all the code available on bitbucket.
>>
>> We'll be using this book in our introductory course this fall at Luther,
>> and adding more videos as we move through the semester.
>>
>> You can take a look at our work here:  http://thinkcspy.appspot.com
>>
>> You'll need a gmail account to access the book. You'll also need a modern
>> browser that supports html5, the interactive features rely heavily on
>> Javascript and the canvas element.  (Safari, Firefox 6, Chrome) The reason
>> is that the interactive code allows you to save your changes and reload them
>> again later.  I've added an administrative back-end to the book so that we
>> can have students do homework right in the browser.  I'd love to hear your
>> feedback and ideas for other interactive features.
>>
>> Brad
>>
>> --
>> Brad Miller
>> Associate Professor, Computer Science
>> Luther College
>>
>>
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-- 
Sarina Canelake
MIT EECS
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