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Re: [Edu-sig] Visual Programming in Python?

Kirby Urner (kirby.urner@...)

> PyLogo wouldn't be particularly useful
teaching Python, since it isn't
> Python.  But it makes it possible to share infrastructure and
> environment between the two languages.  So (barring some small details)
> you could run VPython from Logo, and the students would be building
> familiarity with that model.	And I think there's no reason VPython in
> Logo would look much different than in Python -- the core concepts there
> aren't bound to the language, they are bound to the domain of 3D modeling.

I think implementing swimming turtles within VPython, using pure
Python modules and syntax, is a viable approach.  I might just use
IPython as a command line shell, and have kids instantiate and
instruct their turtles from there.  VPython would be the view. 
Modules (perhaps organized in an __init__ package) would supply the
model (command line is controller).

Kirby
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Re: [Edu-sig] Visual Programming in Python?

Ian Bicking (ianb@...)

Jeff Sandys wrote:
> Kirby said:
>> So this isn't Logo, but it's probably where we're headed with 
>> the turtle stuff:
>>
>> t1 = Turtle()
>> t1.forward(10)
>>
>> I can imagine a big commercial company contributing a colorful
>> professional grade edition to the education community, via GNU 
>> or whatever.  Making the syntax consistently Pythonic would be 
>> an attractive feature (implement bindings for both Python *and*
>> traditional Logo why not?).
> 
> Thank you, Kirby, for expressing this.  While PyLogo is an 
> interesting and valuable experiment, I don't think that it will 
> contribute to introductory Python programming education.  I love 
> Logo syntax and enjoy teaching Logo to Middle school students.
> I wouldn't use PyLogo when teaching Python.

PyLogo wouldn't be particularly useful teaching Python, since it isn't 
Python.  But it makes it possible to share infrastructure and 
environment between the two languages.	So (barring some small details) 
you could run VPython from Logo, and the students would be building 
familiarity with that model.  And I think there's no reason VPython in 
Logo would look much different than in Python -- the core concepts there 
aren't bound to the language, they are bound to the domain of 3D modeling.

A bunch of other parts are also relatively unassociated with the 
language, like the basic development process (editing code, running 
programs, etc).

As to the merits of Logo as a language and Python as a language, I'm not 
sure.  Logo is grammatically simpler.  Generally it is more insulated 
from the underlying implementation.  It isn't burdened with ideas like 
"good software engineering".  But it's not necessarily designed to lead 
to Python, as say Guido van Robot is.  But anyway, that's a different 
(though still interesting) discussion.	At least PyLogo lets you hedge 
your language bets a bit, if you are working on non-language concerns.

> What I would like to see in a turtle environment comes from 
> StarLogo ( http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/ ).  StarLogo has 
> multiple turtles, the turtles can inherit methods to make new 
> turtle classes, and the background also has methods for its cells, 
> implementing Conway's Life only takes several lines.	The Santa 
> Fe Institute uses StarLogo to teach non-programmers sophisticated 
> behavior and business simulations.
> 
> I think that creating a StarPython, with Python syntax, would be 
> a more valuable effort that forcing Python to resemble Logo.

That's hard, or maybe easy.

With CPython, something like StarPython is hard. The kind of concurrency 
it does isn't practical with OS threads.  Maybe with Greenlets, though I 
must admit I don't understand them.

But with Stackless Python it might not be so hard, at least within 
certain constraints.  Cooperative microthreads are possible there, and 
that's kind of at the core of StarLogo's system.  Implementing the 
turtles from that point might not be so hard.

That said, I'm not sure how well Stackless interacts with C extensions, 
i.e., the graphics available in Python.  I guess that would be something 
to try out.

> Python would be easier to teach if it had clearer error messages. 
> Most Logo error messages lead the programmer to the solution for 
> the bug.  I would like to see an IDE that had Doctest and maybe 
> profile as a button in the menu bar.

Error messages are indeed hard.  It's easier when you have a clear idea 
of system and user code.  In a typical Logo implementation where the 
library is implemented in a language other than Logo, it's easy to tell 
what is inside and outside -- everything in Logo belongs to the 
programmer, everything not in Logo belongs to the system.  In Python it 
is not so easy, especially because errors often bubble up from deep in 
system code, and you actually have to inspect the system code to 
understand what it means in the context of your code.  As an example, 
shutil(None, 'tmp'):

Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "", line 1, in ?
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/shutil.py", line 81, in copy
     copyfile(src, dst)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/shutil.py", line 41, in copyfile
     if _samefile(src, dst):
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/shutil.py", line 31, in _samefile
     return os.path.samefile(src, dst)
   File "/usr/lib/python2.4/posixpath.py", line 218, in samefile
     s1 = os.stat(f1)
TypeError: coercing to Unicode: need string or buffer, NoneType found

Sigh.  It's not like hiding that traceback can make that error more 
understandable.  I really don't know how to resolve that.

Though it definitely is possible to trim exceptions down.  For instance, 
not to show code that is part of the standard library (or at least 
filter that out unless explicitly expanded).  That won't make the 
exception make sense (coerce to Unicode?! talk about obscure), but at 
least it will better highlight the problem code.

> Another advanced Logo is Elica ( http://www.elica.net/ ).  Elica 
> has 3D geometry, a nice object browser and abandons the Logo like 
> Ask and Tell object syntax for Python like dot notation.  Elica 
> architecture allows linking other programs.  I imagine a close 
> integration of Python and Elica ( Pelican ? ) but this is beyond 
> my programming abilities.

Elica is definitely interesting.  It seems pretty bound to Windows; or 
at least the graphical side, I would assume.  A Windows dependency seems 
like a problem for many of the target projects.

-- 
Ian Bicking  |	ianb@...  |  http://blog.ianbicking.org
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[Edu-sig] Interested in reviewing proposals for Python texts?

Christianna Lee (Christianna_Lee@...)

Hello, my name is Christianna Lee and I am
posting this e-mail on behalf of
Prentice Hall.	We are currently looking for qualified professors to help us
by reviewing proposals for textbook projects using Python.  We are seeing a
surge in the number of classes using Python as a programming language and we
are interested in creating innovative and relevant texts to bolster this
trend.	

 

We would prefer professors who are currently teaching Python at a four year
college, but would be interested in hearing from anyone who feels they are
qualified to review Python-based pedagogical material.	If you are
interested, please e-mail me at this address with your name, description of
the classes you teach and/or your qualifications for reviewing Python
material.  Thank you so much and we look forward to hearing from you!

 

Regards,
Christianna 

 

 

 

Christianna Lee

Editorial Assistant- Computer Science

One Lake Street

Upper Saddle River, NJ 07458

 

ph-201-236-7878

fax-201-236-7170

 

 


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[Edu-sig] Visual Programming in Python?

Jeff Sandys (jpsandys@...)

Kirby said:
> So this isn't Logo, but it's probably where we're headed with 
> the turtle stuff:
>
> t1 = Turtle()
> t1.forward(10)
> 
> I can imagine a big commercial company contributing a colorful
> professional grade edition to the education community, via GNU 
> or whatever.	Making the syntax consistently Pythonic would be 
> an attractive feature (implement bindings for both Python *and*
> traditional Logo why not?).

Thank you, Kirby, for expressing this.	While PyLogo is an 
interesting and valuable experiment, I don't think that it will 
contribute to introductory Python programming education.  I love 
Logo syntax and enjoy teaching Logo to Middle school students.
I wouldn't use PyLogo when teaching Python.
  
What I would like to see in a turtle environment comes from 
StarLogo ( http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/ ).  StarLogo has 
multiple turtles, the turtles can inherit methods to make new 
turtle classes, and the background also has methods for its cells, 
implementing Conway's Life only takes several lines.  The Santa 
Fe Institute uses StarLogo to teach non-programmers sophisticated 
behavior and business simulations.

I think that creating a StarPython, with Python syntax, would be 
a more valuable effort that forcing Python to resemble Logo.

Python would be easier to teach if it had clearer error messages. 
Most Logo error messages lead the programmer to the solution for 
the bug.  I would like to see an IDE that had Doctest and maybe 
profile as a button in the menu bar.

Another advanced Logo is Elica ( http://www.elica.net/ ).  Elica 
has 3D geometry, a nice object browser and abandons the Logo like 
Ask and Tell object syntax for Python like dot notation.  Elica 
architecture allows linking other programs.  I imagine a close 
integration of Python and Elica ( Pelican ? ) but this is beyond 
my programming abilities.

Kirby, where is your final Shuttleworth report?  Did you get 
anything out of it?  I liked your XP idea of piloting many ideas.  
Do you think they will create a successful curriculum in 3 years?

Thanks,
Jeff Sandys


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[Edu-sig] Kirby presents to LKL (streaming video)

Kirby Urner (kirby.urner@...)

So the London Knowledge Lab has kindly made
available my little
Pythonic mathematics talk via streaming video (Quicktime).  If you
want to stare at a small patch of screen into which I sometimes float,
balloon-like, have a look.

http://www.lkl.ac.uk/video/urner0406.html

That design on my T-shirt is some Native American like logo, a bird
head I think (ask ActiveState), not a phallus.

Kirby
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Re: [Edu-sig] Visual Programming in Python?

Nelson Castillo (nelsoneci@...)

> A while ago I received an email from Nelson
Castillo (sorry Nelson,
> for not having replied sooner) who wrote a [non-Python] program that
> does something similar to what you are describing.  The program can be
> found at http://geocities.com/arhuaco/dfd.html
> I have received a request to include something like what you describe
> within rur-ple (wxPython based, rather than Tkinter).  I have
> postponed looking into it seriously until version 1.0 of rur-ple
> (realistically, not until the end of the summer).  I would be
> interested in such a project - with the time constraint caveat.

It seems people like to use graphical programs a lot. Dfd is
widely used. It's in C++. Unfortunately, the other authors don't
agree about releasing it with a free license :(

I really wish to see some similar program.

--
http://arhuaco.org/
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Re: [Edu-sig] Visual Programming in Python?

Ian Bicking (ianb@...)

kirby urner wrote:
>>An interesting exercise might be translating some parts of Computer
>>Science Logo Style (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html) into
>>Python, to get a feel for how much of a text like that is related to the
>>language, and how much to the environment.
>>
>>
>>--
>>Ian Bicking  /  ianb@...  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org
> 
> 
> One thing that was new was Alan Kay, representing Seymour Papert's
> views to the best of his ability, suggested that Seymour no longer
> regards "suppressing the receiver" as an important feature, meaning
> he's paving the way for explicity mention of the turtle as a message
> receiver, e.g. via Python notation:
> 
> So this isn't Logo, but it's probably where we're headed with the turtle stuff:
> 
> t1 = Turtle()
> t1.forward(10)
> 
> I can imagine a big commercial company contributing a colorful
> professional grade edition to the education community, via GNU or
> whatever.  Making the syntax consistently Pythonic would be an
> attractive feature (implement bindings for both Python *and*
> traditional Logo why not?).

I've struggled a little with how this would work in Logo, and looked 
some at how different dialects do it.  I have it something like this in 
PyLogo:

   make :t newturtle
   tell :t forward 10

And then I was thinking of extending OO in the same way dynamic scope 
works, which is sloppy but amused me, and maybe an OK kind of sloppy.  So:

   forward 10

Means "ask all the active objects if they know how to 'forward'", where 
there is a stack of active objects, ending with the global namespace 
(where plain functions are kept).  Then you do:

   tell :t [forward 10]

Which puts :t onto the end of that stack, then executes the block.  You 
can use it like:

   make :s (open "filename "w)
   tell :s [write "hi]

Which will write "hi" to the filename, since the file object will be on 
the object stack.  However, the plain "tell :t forward 10" would still 
work as a special syntax, which would require that :t actually implement 
a forward method.

Incidentally, all of this works off the Python object model (to the 
degree I have it implemented -- it's not quite complete yet), so you 
really could share a single Turtle implementation between the two.

I have yet to figure out how to implement keyword arguments in Logo, 
though.  I was trying to figure out how I might run VPython from PyLogo, 
and the keyword arguments were a real kicker there.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /	ianb@...  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org
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Re: [Edu-sig] Visual Programming in Python?

Andre Roberge (andre.roberge@...)

On 4/17/06, Ian Bicking  kirby urner wrote:
[snip]
> >
> > Alan Kay strongly believes a young child shouldn't have to type to
> > experience programming, i.e. some kind of drag and drop or other
> > non-typing interface should facilitate programming.
>
> I think "typing" is the wrong thing to look at.  A young child shouldn't
> have to hunt and peck -- too many things to keep track of at once.  And
> they shouldn't have to form grammatically correct code, which doesn't
> mean anything to them when they are starting.
>
> But that doesn't make typing as a whole bad.	So a typical entry into a
> Logo environment involves a kid using the arrow keys to define a shape.
>   They get some output, they don't have to hunt and peck, they have a
> constrained environment.
>
> None of which is necessarily *better* than a graphically composable
> program.  But it's certainly a lot easier to create ;)  Where perhaps it
> becomes more interesting is using these things as a path to full
> grammar.  For instance, you hit some arrows, and you have a very very
> crude paint program.	Not that fun.  But if you turn that into language,
> then you have something more interesting.  E.g., they hit some keys,
> they have a "shape", but the shape is actually represented as
> programming text, like:
>
>    [F F F R F F R F R R L L F ...]
>
> That's the most simple representation, just the keys they hit.  You
> could even use glyphs instead of letters.  But it introduces the idea,
> and starts to open up areas for further abstraction.	In the geometric
> world of turtles, it gives you a basic and nontrivial building block
> (well, nontrivial depending on the age -- but you could also adjust this
> accordingly).  It also lets the student learn from immitation -- in this
> case, immitating the code created by the constrained interface.  Unlike
> much-reviled code generators seen elsewhere, the constrained interfaces
> would create human-editable code, and would not be a "complete"
> environment (like no editing built into them).
>

Nice ideas.  I'm going to adapt them in rur-ple (sorry about my
single mindedness :-)	As it stand, within rur-ple, one can
make the robot move forward (after clicking in its world window
to give it focus) by pressing the up arrow key; turning left by
pressing the left arrow key; picking up beeper by pressing "p",
and putting one down by pressing "P".  This was mostly done for
earlier testing of the program.  Now, I can link this to the
editing window by "typing" the corresponding commands
[move(), turn_left(), pick_beeper(), put_beeper()] in addition
to updating the graphical world when the appropriate keys are pressed.

In terms of user interactions, the only caveat that I see is that
I should probably find a way to indicate which sub-window
(editor or robot world) has the focus...  I suppose I could change
the background color...

Any of you think the above ideas are silly?...

As for the next step (flowchart for decision tree), I think it would
have to be handled very differently.

André
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Re: [Edu-sig] Visual Programming in Python?

Kirby Urner (kirby.urner@...)

> An interesting exercise might be
translating some parts of Computer
> Science Logo Style (http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo.html) into
> Python, to get a feel for how much of a text like that is related to the
> language, and how much to the environment.
>
>
> --
> Ian Bicking  /  ianb@...  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org

One thing that was new was Alan Kay, representing Seymour Papert's
views to the best of his ability, suggested that Seymour no longer
regards "suppressing the receiver" as an important feature, meaning
he's paving the way for explicity mention of the turtle as a message
receiver, e.g. via Python notation:

So this isn't Logo, but it's probably where we're headed with the turtle stuff:

t1 = Turtle()
t1.forward(10)

I can imagine a big commercial company contributing a colorful
professional grade edition to the education community, via GNU or
whatever.  Making the syntax consistently Pythonic would be an
attractive feature (implement bindings for both Python *and*
traditional Logo why not?).

Kirby
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Re: [Edu-sig] More post Summit brainstorming

Kirby Urner (kirby.urner@...)

> Is the idea to teach programming?  That
seems wrong for any inclusive
> curriculum.  Programming-the-skill will never be relevant to most of
> these children.  As a way of teaching a larger set of ideas about
> abstraction, I think programming is a great medium.  But it's only a
> useful skill for a small set of students.

The idea is to teach a new kind of fluency that accommodates the
technologies likely to make the most difference in a developing world
context.  Cheap hardware and free software make for a new kind of
analytic thinking skills delivery system, a new kind of playground if
you will.  Not just your daddy's swings and slides any more.

So we approach a coding language much as we approach a math notation
today, complete with greek letters and canned functions.  It's a new
way of covering a lot of familiar ground, while meanwhile roping in a
lot more contemporary information, relating to real world challenges
on the ground.

> One thing that I think Logo gets really right is the insistence
> (cultural as much as anything) that it isn't a language for teaching
> programming, it's for teaching *with* programming.
>

Yes, this is "programming to learn" more than "learning to program".

We'll develop our analytical skills by practicing OO-style thinking,
meaning a diagrammatic breakup of a problem domain into main players
and their relationships, a kind of analysis needed in advance of any
coding.

How far into working code we go will depend on the context, but some
practice in going all the way will be necessary, because students want
that kind of feedback as a measure of mastery.

If your code doesn't actually work, what fun is that?

Kirby
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