On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Maria Droujkova <[email protected]> wrote:
<< SNIP >> > That's why I am looking for kid-friendly AND large communities of > practice first and foremost for any educational endeavors... > > > > -- > Cheers, > MariaD There's the old chicken versus egg problem when it comes to "large communities". Funny story: Silicon Valley schmoozer comes to one of our Pioneer Place venture capital conventions and hears all this talk about "bootstrapping", complains that's not kosher where she comes from, sounds like we're poor, rubbing two sticks together, out in the cold, whereas in the Valley (plus Austin has Hills) it's better to sound like you *already have* tons of money, as that's what'll work for ya out of the box, once you do. What no one explained to this interloper is "bootstrap" has a perfectly objective meaning in engineering that actually applies in startup scenarios. You want just enough code in memory to serve as a foothold for some larger beast, which then climbs to the next rung and so on. Before you know it, you've dealing with IBM or one of those (i.e. some big kahuna that started in a modest little shop or garage say on Hawthorne, aka Asylum Ave. (e.g. the ESI story, which I like to tell, as we're still in it in some ways, thanks to Doug Strain's connections to the Linus Pauling venture, not to mention local Friends)). In any case, remember that teachers, not just students, like that feeling of being in a small pilot or government study, elite guinea pigs, something to brag about, kind of like TAG. That's where I like talking about the Winterhaven Experiment (see slides) where Silicon Forest executives had total control of our "geek Hogwarts", were able to boot Google Earth the first day, go from there to Kml to Xml to GIS more generally, as a set of rich data structures on a polyhedron (planet Earth), ergo we're talking geography (GIS) not just geometry, etc. Bridging geometry and geography is a fond goal of ours. How else to do "place based education" in the age of dodecacams. Winterhaven already has the Oaks Bottom connection i.e. kids to ecology around that ecosystem, file results over time. Using Python to generate Tufte style visualizations about the real world is our idea of a good time. We want worldly geeks, not head in the sand nerds. The kids loved it, got to "fly over" their own school, other locations. Basically, once you've tasted math on a real computer in a real programming language, you won't willingly retreat to the bad old days, when we only shared calculators. That would come across of penalizing, taking away toys, dumbing it down, deprivation, probably cause riots. In part that's why some schools are reluctant to take the leap, because they're in cahoots with the others in not making the others look bad (as in "non-viable"). Fortunately, in this climate of innovation thanks to a deteriorating economy, the government itself suffers from no such compunctions and is happy to explore new models of charter school build around FOSS, offering merit pay, and making their debut in Alaska and places. We'll even fly the teachers down to Portland for training why not. Alaska Airlines could use the business. We shall see. Having followed this thread since the 1980s (pre Python) from a vantage point in McGraw-Hill, other places, I'm thinking Logo exhausted itself by being not general purpose enough. As a stepping stone to LISP and Scheme, it kind of worked, at places like MIT. But in the hands of inexperienced teachers, it languished and died. BASIC, on the other hand, was always butt ugly and an insecure basis for any large business. Fortunately, Microsoft is rescuing itself the CLR and the dot NET platform, which makes VB just one more client language, and not an especially important one (good riddance!). Now that MIT is switching to Python, and now that we have a strong turtle module right out of the box, thanks to Gregor, we at least have no credibility problems when it comes to picking up where the 1980s left off. But that still puts us 30 years behind, which is a lot of catching up to do. Back to Scott's remarks about how "IBM and Microsoft would already be doing this if it made any sense" (paraphrase), we hear the same thing from students about the spatial geometry I'm doing with Python. But if you've followed the story closely (e.g. been looking over my shoulder) you know we have almost no competition and no resistance from higher math. Wolfram's cellular automata haven't lost their relevance and John Zelle's graphics.py makes doing his kind of science really a piece of cake, even in Tk (still an included battery in 3.x, as IDLE lives on, complete with easy widgets -- John is wise to exploit that I think). Once you move off a flat surface and want to fill space, you're plop into 'The Book of Numbers' by Conway and Guy, and that's right where we pick it up with the Python, doing "gnomon studies" around the figurate and polyhedral numbers. Kids are writing generators in the first 30 minutes in some scenarios, as this is just like functions in algebra class, but with state preserved between calls. They notice the quality of their cafeteria conversation suddenly skyrockets as they're sounding more and more like geeks every day. That's one step closer to being like Selena & Audrey, our young OS Bridge organizers, into PostgreSQL and Rails respectively, or like Tim Bauman, one of my proteges, knows all kinds of cool stuff. Role models within age range, not some 50 year old like me, is what they're looking for. In the Python community that's no problem. This CPP kids from Iceland must be about 17? I played xBox guitar with 'em, after knocking back a few, as they wanted proof that 50 year olds still have hand-eye coordination. I think I did well enough by our species to prove we still do. Kirby > > Make math your own, to make your own math. > > http://www.naturalmath.com social math site > http://www.phenixsolutions.com empowering our innovations > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
