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

[Wes Turner]

> 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.

Do you find teamed presentations to be more effective, contrived, or
overwhelming than just speaking aloud to model the cognitive process of
model development? Modeling a mature process for correcting for mistakes
and errors is sometimes absent from prepared demos that make it look like
it's so easy for *them* (because they spent time preparing and rehearsing)


On Sunday, June 23, 2019, Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Do you start with 2D observational data; as a model development exercise?
> Is that freely available online somewhere?
>
> For the 3D cube projected into 2D space rotation problem:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation
>
> > In each reference frame, an observer can use a local coordinate system
> (most exclusively Cartesian coordinates in this context) to measure
> lengths, and a clock to measure time intervals. An observer is a real or
> imaginary entity that can take measurements, say humans, or any other
> living organism—or even robots and computers. An event is something that
> happens at a point in space at an instant of time, or more formally a point
> in spacetime. The transformations connect the space and time coordinates of
> an event as measured by an observer in each frame.[nb 1]
> >
> > They supersede the Galilean transformation of Newtonian physics, which
> assumes an absolute space and time (see Galilean relativity). The Galilean
> transformation is a good approximation only at relative speeds much smaller
> than the speed of light. Lorentz transformations have a number of
> unintuitive features that do not appear in Galilean transformations. For
> example, they reflect the fact that observers moving at different
> velocities may measure different distances, elapsed times, and even
> different orderings of events, but always such that the speed of light is
> the same in all inertial reference frames. The invariance of light speed is
> one of the postulates of special relativity.
>
>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>> - 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_To
>>>>> morrow/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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