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

[Jeff Elkner]

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 12:24 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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. ^_^

It is already in Ubuntu, Edward, by way of Debian...

>> 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.

Awesome!  I can't wait to see what you come up with.

jeff

>> 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
>