[Edu-sig] Anyone interested in discussing the turtle module?

[Edward Cherlin]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 08:05, Jeff Elkner <jeff at elkner.net> wrote:
> Hi Edward,
>
> The book is licensed under the GNU/FDL and is available here:
>
> http://www.openbookproject.net/thinkcs

Excellent. Thank you.

> I'm very familiar with Turtle Art, since a college intern working with
> me last Summer did a Sugar to Gnome port of it, which in now in the
> debian repositories:
>
> http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=turtleart
>
> This Summer we will work to get that into Fedora.

I should talk to someone about getting it into Ubuntu, to add to Logo,
kturtleart, and the turtle art module in Etoys. ^_^

> While as a classroom teacher I'm a huge fan of turtle art, Python's
> own turtle module is the tool of choice for my current intro college
> leve textbook project, since it runs on all major platforms and is
> part of the Python standard library.

I am planning a multi-year grade school sequence to introduce CS ideas
using TA, with a transition from TA to Python by way of Python blocks
in TA. I will take a look at your work, and see whether it makes sense
to treat it as a followup to mine, or rather to design mine to lead
into yours.

Among the topics I intend to emphasize are Church's Thesis, Gödel
recursive functions, parse trees, stack programming (and hence RPN),
language interpretation, and building a Turing Machine in pure TA.

> Thanks!
>
> jeff elkner
> open book project
> http://openbookproject.net
>
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 16:59, Jeff Elkner <jeff at elkner.net> wrote:
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I'm working on an introductory CS book using Python with the turtle
>>> module,
>>
>> Under what license?
>>
>> Can we talk about using Turtle Art in Sugar as a starting point? it
>> can call Python functions assigned to blocks, providing an easy
>> transition from pure TA to pure Python. We have support for various
>> other CS topics on TA blocks, including stack operations. I am
>> planning to write a Turing machine in TA, using colored dots as cells
>> on the tape and instructions in the transition table.
>>
>>> but I'm finding the inability of turtle.Screen() to take
>>> screen size arguments to be a real pain.  The screen size appears to
>>> depend on the screen size of the host environment, which means
>>> standardizing screen shots for the book becomes impossible.
>>>
>>> Any thoughts on this issue?  It would be a huge help in promoting
>>> Python's use in education if we could make use of such a potentially
>>> fine module as the turtle module, but I'm finding it very difficult to
>>> write curriculum materials that use it since students don't have
>>> control over the turtle's screen in any easy to use way.
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>>
>>> jeff elkner
>>> open book project
>>> http://openbookproject.net
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Edu-sig mailing list
>>> Edu-sig at python.org
>>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> 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.
>> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks
>>
>



-- 
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.
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks