Education BoF at PyCon
Vern Ceder
I've just put a placeholder down for us on the BoF wiki page for PyCon -
http://wiki.python.org/moin/Birds_of_a_Feather - I assume some of us
will want to get together in Chicago. The question, as always, is where
and when...
Cheers,
Vern
--
This time for sure!
-Bullwinkle J. Moose
-----------------------------
Vern Ceder, Director of Technology
Canterbury School, 3210 Smith Road, Ft Wayne, IN 46804
vce...@canterburyschool.org; 260-436-0746; FAX: 260-436-5137
Andrew Harrington
Good thinking. In the past we have gotten together to talk over food and in a separate meeting time that does not conflict with talks.
thoughts:
lunch. lunch Friday is 90 minutes. The next two days 45 minute talks overlap it by 15 minutes, so it is down to 75 minutes
Going out to dinner was fun last year. could be Friday or Saturday.
We have met in the evening. Saturday would be good.
A difference from last year is that we have Chicago easily accessible from the hotel! If people want to go out and see it in the evenings, and not meet at that time, then I suggest meeting for lunch Friday and maybe a pre-dinner time. Or we could all pile on the El and head to Greektown or ....
Andy
Andrew N. Harrington
Director of Academic Programs
Computer Science Department
Loyola University Chicago
512B Lewis Towers (office)
Snail mail to Lewis Towers 416
820 North Michigan Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60611
http://www.cs.luc.edu/~anh
Phone: 312-915-7999
Fax: 312-915-7998
g...@cs.luc.edu for graduate administration
u...@cs.luc.edu for undergrad administration
aha...@luc.edu as professor
Jeffrey Elkner
Just name the time and place. I'm there!
jeff
kirby urner
Kirby
> _______________________________________________
> Edu-sig mailing list
> Edu...@python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
>
Vern Ceder
in past years to pass up. I personally would be up for a trip too
Greektown, but it may be more time than some others have to spare.
I also think we should grab some open space time to have a (slightly)
more formal gathering - we didn't do that last year, since we wanted to
go to the OLPC gathering, and I, for one, missed it.
So how does Friday evening sound? It looks like we would have the most
time after the day's formal activities are over. What does everyone think?
Cheers,
Vern
> _______________________________________________
> Edu-sig mailing list
> Edu...@python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
--
kirby urner
be in the hotel venue by Thursday night. I had to think long an hard
about missing tutorials, but I'll have two daughters in tow (one adult,
one dependent) and a limited window. But hey, Friday, BOF table,
any other gathering of edu-sig types, would be a pleasure.
On the Python in Portland front, my Saturday Academy class didn't
fill, freeing me up to private tutor, plus we're exploring a deal with Intel
(I'll let ya know). Anna Roys of TECC in Alaska (charter school
on the drawing board) is continuing to incorporate more Python
into her lesson plans (some of these are for credit, as she's
seeking a new credential, having found out the hard way what
it's like to be outside an inner circle).
The funny thing about the computer training interview was the boss
in charge hadn't even heard of Python. I keep forgetting how we're
"news" in some circles -- which can be a *good* thing (means we
still get to make that all important "first impression").
A lot of the math teachers I encounter, in my work with the schools,
still have this 1970s picture of computer programs consisting of
reams of paper, tall stacks of punch cards. When they see Pippy
programs, or mine (even shorter), I sense some relief. **
MathCad was in a lot of ways a bridge application (still is), in that
it allows users the math symbols they're used to (Riemann Sum
symbols and like that), yet in the background we're talking
spreadsheet-with-formulas, lots of text mixed in (a good MathCad
paper is both an essay and an executable -- reminiscent of Leo
in some ways). My friend David Feinstein (CalTech, studied under
Feynman) will go straight from a MathCad "paper" to a patch of
runnable code in some embedded device. Even when engineers
get lost in their own framework, the part David contributed remains
a model of clarity.
Kirby
** here's an excerpt from one of my internal TECC communications:
In Python, we have the four major operations you find
on the cheapest of calculators, + - * /. Then we also
have %, which is the "modulo" operator. Increasing
student comfort level with modulo arithmetic (what
some textbooks call "clock arithmetic") is another
goal of this curriculum, connected to all of the above.
So, for example, in some of our lessons, we use our
gcd function, i.e. Euclid's Algorithm, to find what are
called the "totatives" of a number: all positive integers
smaller than N, with no factors in common with N,
i.e. smaller positives "coprime" to N. How many
totatives N has is called its totient.
So in Python:
"""
tecc1.py:
thunderbird academy
"""
def gcd ( a, b):
"Euclid's Algorithm"
while b:
a, b = b, a % b
return a
def totatives( n ):
"0 < coprimes of n < n"
return [ x for x in range(1, n) if gcd(x, n) == 1 ]
def totient( n ):
"number of totatives"
return len(totatives(n))
Example of student using the above in the interactive
shell:
>>> from tecc1 import *
>>> gcd(12, 27)
3
>>> totient(27)
18
>>> totatives(27)
[1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26]
>>> totatives(12)
[1, 5, 7, 11]
>>> totient(12)
4
and so on.
Note how these three Python functions, indicated with
the keyword 'def' are very short, easy to follow once
you've learned a few basics. Note also that these
functions then get accessed interactively, much like
the experience of using a calculator (but probably
with a bigger screen) -- no writing some menu or
looping structure with prompts (very 1970s).
Andrew Harrington
One idea: A more formal meeting would pretty clearly be at the conference. We could do that Friday, say 8PM. There might be discussion then of how much time to invest in heading out to dinner Saturday.
Andy
Jeffrey Elkner
jeff
Vern Ceder
afraid).
Yeah, you pretty much figured it out - I was thinking that we might want
to grab an open space for Friday evening, and I wasn't sure which night
we might want to do dinner.
I've put down your suggestion (which makes sense to me) on the wiki page
linked from our entry on the BoF page - the direct link is
http://wiki.python.org/moin/EduPython2008
Everyone who's interested can go there and add themselves to the list
and note any conflicts they know of. Of course further suggestions,
either here or on the wiki, would be appreciated.
Cheers,
Vern
> <vce...@canterburyschool.org <mailto:vce...@canterburyschool.org>>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hey, everyone...
> >>>
> >>> I've just put a placeholder down for us on the BoF wiki page
> for PyCon -
> >>> http://wiki.python.org/moin/Birds_of_a_Feather - I assume some
> of us
> >>> will want to get together in Chicago. The question, as always,
> is where
> >>> and when...
> >>>
> >>> Cheers,
> >>> Vern
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> This time for sure!
> >>> -Bullwinkle J. Moose
> >>> -----------------------------
> >>> Vern Ceder, Director of Technology
> >>> Canterbury School, 3210 Smith Road, Ft Wayne, IN 46804
> >>> vce...@canterburyschool.org
> <mailto:vce...@canterburyschool.org>; 260-436-0746; FAX: 260-436-5137
> >>>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Andrew N. Harrington
> >> Director of Academic Programs
> >> Computer Science Department
> >> Loyola University Chicago
> >> 512B Lewis Towers (office)
> >> Snail mail to Lewis Towers 416
> >> 820 North Michigan Avenue
> >> Chicago, Illinois 60611
> >>
> >> http://www.cs.luc.edu/~anh <http://www.cs.luc.edu/%7Eanh>
> >> Phone: 312-915-7999
> >> Fax: 312-915-7998
> >> g...@cs.luc.edu <mailto:g...@cs.luc.edu> for graduate administration
> >> u...@cs.luc.edu <mailto:u...@cs.luc.edu> for undergrad administration
> >> aha...@luc.edu <mailto:aha...@luc.edu> as professor
> >>
> >> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > Edu-sig mailing list
> > Edu...@python.org <mailto:Edu...@python.org>
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
>
> --
> This time for sure!
> -Bullwinkle J. Moose
> -----------------------------
> Vern Ceder, Director of Technology
> Canterbury School, 3210 Smith Road, Ft Wayne, IN 46804
> vce...@canterburyschool.org <mailto:vce...@canterburyschool.org>;
> 260-436-0746; FAX: 260-436-5137
>
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Andrew N. Harrington
> Director of Academic Programs
> Computer Science Department
> Loyola University Chicago
> 512B Lewis Towers (office)
> Snail mail to Lewis Towers 416
> 820 North Michigan Avenue
> Chicago, Illinois 60611
>
> http://www.cs.luc.edu/~anh <http://www.cs.luc.edu/%7Eanh>
> Phone: 312-915-7999
> Fax: 312-915-7998
> g...@cs.luc.edu <mailto:g...@cs.luc.edu> for graduate administration
> u...@cs.luc.edu <mailto:u...@cs.luc.edu> for undergrad administration
> aha...@luc.edu <mailto:aha...@luc.edu> as professor
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Lingl
I've been off line for a while, due to a lot of work ...
... but since approx. two weeks I've found time to continue my work
on xturtle.py and to implement a few hopfully useful features as well
as some example scripts demonstrating them. Only one of them I'd
like to mention here, because it proved really very useful for interactive
work with turtle graphics: an undo() method/function, which serves to
correct painlessly the consequences of wrong ideas ;-)
Notes on the new features are in a text file in the xturtle package as well
as here:
http://www.rg16.at/~python/xturtle/whatsnew.txt
You can download the zipped package with xturtle.py, a demoviewer
and the sample scripts from the (still not substantially refreshed)
website:
http://www.rg16.at/~python/xturtle/download.html
Quite a few users asked and/or encouraged me during the last months
to anew propose xturtle.py as a replacement or a supplement for xturtle.py
either for Python 2.6 and especially for Python 3000. (A port of xturtle.py
to Python3000 is under way and nearly ready!)
Morover there is the following point in PEP-0361, the
Python 2.6 and 3.0 release schedule:
- turtle.py replacement or enhancements
I'll propose my workto the developer community within a short time.
The code of the current version works well, albeit it certainly still has
some bugs. (I hope to get bug reports form users ....) I plan to polish
the code during the next weeks.
For now I think, that the current version can serve well as a basis for
a discussion about the following topics:
1) about the API - i. e. about the naming of the classes and methods
as well as about the question if there are some which could be eliminated
or other new features which should be added. (Imho I've reached a
point where it seems not to be reasonable to add substantially more
features)
2) about the question if xturtle should be compatible to turtle.py as far
as possible, in the sense that turtle-programs should run with xturtle
in the same way. (I think this is to a far extent the case now - but it
complicates and extends the code of xturtle considerably.)
Of course many users as well as nonusers of turtle graphics have a
lot of different opinions about it's advantages and disadvantages.I'd
just like to mention once more, the for me it is a very valuable instrument
to visualize computer science concepts easily and consequently to
teach programming. To see better what I mean with this, please have a look
at the code of the minimal_hanoi.py sample script, which implements a
graphical animation of the tower of hanoi game using a lot of advanced
concepts of Python but nearly without any overhead for graphics operations.
That's just my approach to using turtle graphics.
So I'd like to modestly ask you to have a look at the xturtle package,
think about it's usefulness for educational purposes and give some
feedback or contribute otherwise to the discussion.
With kind regards,
Gregor