Crunchy Frog, Spiny Norman, edupython in general

[Michael Tobis]

I'll be giving a brief talk and trying to facilitate discussion at
ChiPy (the Chicago Python association) tomorrow (July 13) evening (7
PM) in downtown Chicago (Performics, 180 N Lasalle, suite 1100) on

Crunchy Frog, Spiny Norman, and networked tools for education

(Note there will also be a talk on parsing and a talk on Perl 6. Order
of presentations is pretty much figured out informally on the spot...)

Spiny Norman is my (as yet very preliminary) answer to Jeff Elkner's
request for a doctest based testing tool, which is amazingly
orthogonal to Andre's approach to a doctest based teaching tool, which
was also inpired by Jeff as I understand it.

Related topics have recently generated quite a lot of discussion on
the chipy mailing list

( http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/chicago ).

mt

[Andrew Harrington]

Dear Michael,
I was still on vacation.
Do you have a reference to to your Spiny Norman?

Andy

Michael Tobis wrote:

--
Andrew N. Harrington
Computer Science Department Director of Academic Programs
Loyola University Chicago http://www.cs.luc.edu/~anh
512B Lewis Towers (office) Office Phone: 312-915-7982
Snail mail to Lewis Towers 416 Dept. Fax: 312-915-7998
820 North Michigan Avenue aha...@luc.edu
Chicago, Illinois 60611

[Michael Tobis]

To make a long story short:

1) I realized that the simplicity I envisioned for Spiny Norman was
overoptimistic, and that I'd either have to introduce two threads per
session or hack into doctest. Ian Bicking, whose judgement I tend to
trust on matters Pythonic, strongly preferred the latter. So now I am
trying to wade through 47 pages of doctest source to find the right
place to insert myself (or Norman).

2) I moved into storage and have been an itinerant bucyclist pending
the start of my lease in a few weeks, which has taken up most of my
energy, My health is greatly improved, but Spiny's is not.

Still hoping to pull this off before summer ends.

mt