I'm thinking more could be made of this piano teacher business as what's needed are cultural templates (design patterns) that're already debugged, plus register as familiar.
People have this picture of the geek squad or geek troubleshooter coming to your house to clean off the viruses, give a few pointers. Then there's the "fix my computer" store, sometimes a hobbyists basement or garage. In one case, the geek comes to you, in the other, you go to the geek. The piano teacher I'm thinking of has a rotating clientele and the students come to her for individualized instruction. The students are sometimes young, dropped off and picked up. If the parent wants to wait in the living room, while the 45 minutes tick by, that's maybe no problem. The thing about a piano teacher or lets convert that to Python teacher, is there's often this specific lineage or philosophy or school of thought i.e. not all piano teachers have the same approach to teaching. One piano teacher I know puts a great deal of emphasis on posture, including with conscious attention to the skeleton and muscles -- wants the student to share this appreciation, ergo lots of models of bones and joints laying around in the studio: http://www.flickr.com/photos/17157...@n00/3405834921/ (tools of the trade) Not all piano teachers are like Susan though, Python teachers either, though I am, given my focus on __ribs__. :) Guitar teaching is similar in that we'll find multiple approaches, some designed encourage autonomy i.e. some "learn guitar" books are for just teaching yourself, no teacher, no "guitar lessons" per se. But I'm thinking we're maybe entering an era where one-on-one Python tutoring or "Python lessons" is greeted as a way of learning "the new music" aka "the new literacy" ala CP4E (& R0ml). Speaking of CP4E, I'm curious about these web slides, some of the claims (e.g. edu-sig fell apart because Python is too important as a commercial tool to merit much dev time with the pre-employed as a focus): http://webpages.cs.luc.edu/~mt/Python-First/Py1.html ( by Michael Tobis of Ducks-in-a-Row ) More generally, I have a beef with player pianos and other turn of last century breakthroughs in automated music making, not having enough profile in CS lore, i.e. there's a lot of bleeping over to key bridges twixt programming and the arts: music and theater. When you enter a theater, they give you "a program", and "a script" is a program players (actors) follow. The computer programmer often treats the GUI or interface as a "stage" (end user as audience, passive consumer of code) whereas the coding is like "back stage" (ropes, scenery, inventory). Music is a notated execution language, complete with looping and even conditional branching, has the idea of a flow of control, as distinct from the static rendering in notation (as sheet music). A musical instrument is clearly "event driven". This excerpt from Wikipedia sounds a lot like a contemporary open standards agreement: """ A new full-scale roll format, playing all 88 notes, was agreed at an industry conference in Buffalo in 1908, the so called Buffalo Convention. This kept the 11ΒΌ inch roll, but now had smaller holes spaced at 9 to the inch. Any player made anywhere in the world could now play any make of roll. Understanding the need for compatibility was the defining moment of the player industry. The consensus was key to avoiding a costly format war, which plagued almost every other form of entertainment media that followed roll music. """ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_piano The music world isn't just a source of teaching models, it's a source of design patterns more generally. Breaking down barriers between CS and the arts is something Vpython has helped with, PyGeo a good example (or should we say "math and art"?). http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/pygeo.html The lightning talk and open mic formats have a lot in common, leading to a recent divers...@python.org suggestion for more Python Open Mics. Musicians also travel in groups -- could be a dev team (reminds me of Alan, taking Plone on the road, often solo -- met up in Victoria for a sprint that time...). Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
