[Edu-sig] seasonal challenge to calculator dominance in high schools

[C. Cossé]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:36 AM Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> In one lesson developing a simple solar system in pygame, for example, you
> can teach everything from the meaning of pi, periodic motion, dynamic
> graphics, orders of magnitude, scaling, OOP,  ... all kinds of stuff.
>
> What a fun problem! Does PyGame have 2D physics? Kerbal Space Program
> looks fun, too
>

It might by now ... but that's another big lesson: don't use somebody
else's physics libs ... do that yourself too!  For the above problem there
is nothing more than F=ma (W=mg ... Weight=mass x accel_due2_grav) ... the
rest is circle stuff.


>
>
>> AND basically lay the ground-work for developing their own 2D plotting
>> software.
>>
>
> What grade levels or math and physics knowledge would you think
> appropriate for these tasks?
>

No prior knowledge ... it's all on the teacher to be familiar enough to
walk all over and essentially "drag them through" (the kids=them) the
process of developing their own quick solar system model.  It would be a
good team-teaching lesson, one teacher on the white-board lecturing, and
the other typing the python-translation of the lecture into code on a big
screen.



>
> - Specify the coordinates of the vertices of a cube
> - Draw the cube in 3D (2D from a perspective)
> - Rotate the cube or move the 'camera/observer's (around a point other
> than the origin) in 3D space and draw each frame at time t
>
>
>>
>> -Charlie
>>
>> On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 11:09 AM kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Somewhere every summer, I tend to call into question the wisdom of
>>> buying the kids another scientific calculator at the drug store (we call
>>> them that here, pharmacies have calculators hanging on racks at the
>>> checkout, to cash in on gullibility and impulse buys).
>>>
>>> This year:
>>>
>>> https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/4dsolutions/School_of_Tomorrow/blob/master/Sandbox_Example.ipynb
>>>
>>> That's of course the read-only version (vs. mybinder.org) with the
>>> benefit of a free video at the bottom, not visible on Github, where I give
>>> my viewers the elevator speech i.e. pitch Jupyter Notebooks using Python as
>>> superior to slaving away with a graphing calculator.
>>>
>>> Not that anyone is still using graphing calculators right?  Sorry if I'm
>>> beating a dead horse (idiom).
>>>
>>> Kirby
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Edu-sig mailing list
>>> Edu-sig at python.org
>>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> ccosse.github.io
>>
>

-- 

ccosse.github.io
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