[Edu-sig] Python and pre-algebra
mokurai at earthtreasury.org
mokurai at earthtreasury.org
Fri Jul 1 08:32:45 CEST 2011
On Fri, July 1, 2011 1:41 am, kirby urner wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 8:03 PM, <mokurai at earthtreasury.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, June 29, 2011 7:15 pm, mary.dooms at comcast.net wrote:
>> >
>> > I teach 6th grade math and Python was suggested as a way to apply
>> > pre-algebra concepts in a programming context. My programming
>> background
>> > consists of one C++ programming class. How do I begin?
>>
>> Python is one of several excellent options. Others are Logo, Smalltalk,
>> and APL, all of which are available at no cost. I worked on a free APL
>> for
>> 8-bit computers before the Free Software movement got started, and I
>> have
>> friends working on APLs for current computers to put under the GPL.
>>
>
> APL was my first love at Princeton, back when most people (including
> me) had to use punch cards.
You and jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan. He wants to create an APL-based
computer music education program.
At Yale in 1963 we only had octal and FORTRAN. Later on, Yale hired Alan
Perlis away from Carnegie-Mellon to be Chairman of the Computer Science
Department. He made APL the first language for all CS students.
> It was the interactivity I loved, among
> other aspects. Logo the same way. Grew into dBase later, always
> interactive, a dialog. Languages divide into those which respond,
> conversationally, and those which must be looked at as non-conversational.
> Python joined the ranks of the conversationals.
LISP was the first. On the other hand, Waterloo University in Canada
created a FORTRAN interpreter for use in classes, to go with its APL,
Pascal, and others.
>> Assuming that your students know no Python, you could use the Sugar Labs
>> Turtle Art approach to math and programming to get started. Turtle Art
>> was
>> designed for children to use for math, programming, and art, and has
>> natural ways to move to Logo, Python, or Etoys/Smalltalk. FORTH, too,
>> but
>> most people don't want to know that. ^_^ (FORTH love if honk then)
>
> I was a math teacher in a day school for humans of the female
> persuasion, as one of the trusted male faculty (most were not male),
> but this was long before the Free Software movement (GNU / GPL),
> was still at the start of the first computer revolution. No Internet
> yet, at least not for ordinary civilians like me.
My father was using timesharing, and allowed me on at 300 bps.
> I dreamed of hypertext (read Computer Lib / Dream Machines
> by Ted Nelson)
I met Ted when he gave an invited speech at the APL91 Conference at Stanford.
> and joined IGC with a guest account at New
> Jersey Institute of Technology. Proto-internet, pre-listserv. In
> the meantime, snailmailers were proto-typing listservs via
> Action Linkage. Anyone remember? You'd mail your post to
> the anchor, who'd photocopy the lot and mail back out to
> subscribers. The whole listserv phenomenon, happening
> through snailmail.
Pierre de Fermat operated as listserv for all of the top mathematicians of
Europe before the journals got started.
> Lots of ethnography as yet unwritten.
>
> Mid 1980s.
>
> 'A Network Nation' by Turoff and Starr Roxanne Hiltz.
> http://web.njit.edu/~turoff/Vita/vita2005.html#a30
>
> I lived behind Loew's Theater on Journal Square, the main
> PATH station in Jersey City. By 1985, I was back in Portland,
> having been raised there through 2nd grade.
>
>>
>> The question is, which pre-algebra concepts? Do you have a curriculum
>> standard or a particular textbook in mind? Are there other topics of
>> interest?
>>
>> I can write TA or mixed TA/Python examples, and show students how to do
>> the same, and we could work together on lesson plans to share in the
>> Sugar
>> Labs Replacing Textbooks program. There are others with an interest in
>> doing this.
>>
>
> Then I worked at McGraw-Hill (after some stuff in between), 28th floor,
> Rockefeller Center, Manhattan, editing textbooks, testing educational
> computer games, contributing curriculum writing (Logo, BASIC).
We need you to do that again as we find out what children can learn with
computer aid at earlier stages of development than we thought.
> Back then, we thought computers were soon to take the math teaching
> world by storm. Little did we suspect that the North Americans would be
> conquered by Texas Instruments, leaving the innovation vista to
> other cultures and/or subversive counter-cultures still operational
> in some areas.
Thousands of dollars for a computer, under $100 for a calculator. No
contest. HP was content with the engineering market and didn't want to
challenge TI to a retail war.
> OLPC (One Laptop per Child) was one attempt to break the TI lock
> on teacher imaginations. For the most part, it failed in North America.
> The resistance was too great. No breakfast cereal boxes featured
> the XO. Nothing on the backs of Kellogs or General Mills. No
> donated G1G1 commercials during Saturday Morning cartoons.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFmQP3JimAE&feature=related
> http://youtu.be/XSH_5YP0tU8
Ah, but what will happen when we have free digital textbook replacements,
so that netbooks cost less than printed textbooks? Better education at
lower cost. Can politicians resist that?
> Few ever got a clue. Teachers fell further and further behind.
>
> The situation was so bad in Hillsboro (personal anecdote), home
> of Intel in Oregon (Aloha plant) that the police got into the home
> schooling business, tried to do outreach to tomorrow's gangland
> by setting up a Linux Lab in West Precinct (where I came in, as
> a contract instructor).
I have an idea for going after homeschooling networks with OLPCs and
Sugar, also.
> The schools had proved incompetent to do their jobs (educating
> for the future), so the Chief of Police was stepping in (he was
> 2nd generation Chinese immigrant).
>
> I lectured about this Hillsboro experiment to the London Knowledge
> Lab on my way to the Shuttleworth Foundation meeting with
> Helen King et al, our benevolent dictator, Guido, another member
> of our merry party (Scheme also represented).
I met Guido at a BayPiggies meeting (Bay Area Python Interest Group) at
Google, where I mentioned to the audience that both Guido and I were
trying to compile sugar-jhbuild, and reporting to one of the mailing
lists, and that I had not been able to do it. He chimed in from the
audience that he had failed to build it also.
> This was a meeting about South Africa, making long term plans even
> then (government officials were part of Mark's entourage).
The Shuttleworth Foundation funded development of a suite of digital
learning resources for high school math and sciences for South Africa.
>> > Are lesson plans and small programs available, for example,
>>
>> Probably. There are well over 100,000 digital learning resources on the
>> Net. You can find some of them on pages linked from
>>
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Open_Education_Resources
>>
>> We will need a substantial number of teachers to review them, compare
>> them, and select those that do the best job making concepts clear in
>> ways that will stay with students.
>
> The South African model was shaping up to serve auto-didacts.
>
> Kids who could self teach would stand the best chance.
I would like to see how much of that we can help children learn, given
that they learn languages and cultures, among other things, with no formal
instruction.
> The teachers were proving hopeless. Adult teachers could not be
> expected adapt to these technologies in sufficient time in sufficient
> number. Those were the facts on the ground.
I don't think that that is necessarily so, and I intend to have our
Replacing Textbooks project create a sufficient set of teacher training
materials also. On some points, however, we might have to wait until some
of our XO students enter teachers colleges.
> It's not like anyone wanted it to be this way. One had to make the
> best of a bad situation.
>
>>
>> > where students could write and
>> > "drop in" a script that includes integers and the output would not
>> only
>> > calculate it, but see the relevance of it in a real world situation?
>>
>> There are many ways to do that. One of the weirder ones is my Turtle Art
>> Turing Machine for addition. ^_^
>>
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/TurtleArt/Tutorials/Turtle_Art_Turing_Machine
>>
>> More directly to your needs, Pippy is a Sugar activity that shows a
>> number of Python examples that students can edit. For example,
>>
>> Fibonacci
>> a, b = 0, 1
>> while b< 1001:
>> print b,
>> a, b = b, a+b
>>
>> Changing the 0, 1 in the first line changes this from a generator of
>> Fibonacci numbers to a generator of the related Lucas numbers. There is
>> a Pascal's Triangle program. Plotted mod 2, it reveals a Sierpinski
>> fractal.
>
> "Generator" also has a technical meaning in Python, such that one
> might actually write a Fibonacci generator (of the GeneratorType).
>
>>
>> Relevant Python resources include NumPy and PyGame.
>>
>> > Or, perhaps, the program controls a "wheelchair" robot and students
>> would
>> > write scripts to drive the robot at a certain speed considering the
>> slope
>> > of a ramp?
>>
>> See the Etoys tutorial challenge for programming a "car", and the robot
>> program in Uruguay with robots controlled by Sugar software.
>
> Alan Kay was at that Shuttleworth meeting in Kensington. I'm sure
> there've been many follow-up meetings which I've not been privy to, plus
> I've continued to meet with Oregon-based colleagues.
I met Alan Kay at the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart's Mother of All
Demos at Stanford. I had met Doug previously, and was apparently the first
to show him an XO.
> I also work with an outfit in Sonoma County, where Python is concerned.
>
>>
>> http://www.flickr.com/photos/christophd/4827926508/
>> XO turned into a robot thanks to the Butiá project
>>
>> > As you can see, I am a novice, but I see great potential and am
>> > willing to learn.
>>
>> Delighted to meet you.
>>
>
> Ed writes a lot of good posts on many a math-related list. I recommend
> paying attention to his thinking (I know I do).
Thanks, Kirby.
> Kirby
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--
Edward Mokurai
(默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر
ج) Cherlin
Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination.
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