[Edu-sig] Python Education Summit 2016

[kirby urner]

On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 9:49 AM, Chalmer Lowe <chalmer.lowe at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Team:
>
> The Python Education Summit is on again this year at the PyCon in Portland.
>
>
Greetings Chalmer, please send me an invitation if you would.  I missed the
two Montreal Pycons however I'm a resident of Portland and already
registered for the coming one, so it'd be a missed opportunity to miss out
on your PythonEDU Slack Team planning.

I've not submitted any talk proposals so far.  Having been fortunate enough
to present quite a bit in the past, at Pycons and OSCONs in particular, I'm
still referencing / footnoting those presentations as evidence of what I'm
up to and where I'm going -- in case collaboration is an option.

These days, I think in terms of "lambda and delta calculus" as the two
flavors of math we offer to teens, but we don't brand that way (with the
Greek letters).  Delta Calc is regular Calculus, which dominates the high
school math experience whereas Lambda Calc is "computer science"  (or "gnu
math" as I sometimes call it).  Some students might appreciate more sense
of at least two ways to go, with the option to swirl them together.

I'd like to get to know more of the people planning on coming to Portland
in 2016.

What I was saying on Chipy last night, where we were talking about LISP
family languages, is I don't see FP (functional programming) and OO (object
oriented) as either / or, and would myself like to keep spiraling deeper
into a Python - Jython - Java - Clojure circle that eats its own tail.  One
needs a lot of marbles for all that and I've maybe lost one or two over the
years -- but I believe that even late in life, new marbles may be acquired.
:-D

I've been on edu-sig a long time, having hopped on the Python bandwagon
around version 1.6.  I'm interested in 3D graphics from a philosophical
point of view and was drawn, like the late Arthur Siegel of PyGeo fame [1],
to Visual Python (vpython.org).  Quite a bit of my Python-in-education
writing is been in that domain (VRML, ray tracing... this new book by Popko
called Divided Spheres, billed as a primer, nails the domain pretty well ).

Here in Portland we have an institution called Saturday Academy for highly
motivated kids wanting to do extra-curricular work, and my blogs are have
lots of first person accounts of my sharing Python through that school (not
a full time job, pays a pittance).

In that context, I developed a course called Martian Math [2] which is core
to a four-aspect curriculum I share as Digital Mathematics, though I've
come nowhere close to achieving the fame of some others doing that. [3]

I look forward to meeting you in 2016.

Kirby

[1]
http://python.6.x6.nabble.com/arthur-siegel-has-passed-away-td2108619.html

[2]  http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/martianmath/toc.html

[3]  https://newrepublic.com/article/124750/man-will-save-math
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