[Edu-sig] PyGeo

[Dustin James Mitchell]

>As to particular design decisions I made with PyGeo, I am certainly >open
to ideas, suggestions, criticisms.  To the extent you may >conclude that I
may have gone off-track in designing PyGeo (as >relevant to the goals of
EDU-SIG), please jump in. I would ideally >like to see PyGeo as raw
material to play with for those interested >in the goals of EDU-SIG. >
>ART

Art, as you say, there's much that's similar between our respective
approaches.  You back end into OpenGL, which gives students direct and
immediate feedback on the screen, whereas I back end into Povray.

Suddenly I see where ART's use of immediate redraws instead of explicit
'ob.draw()' calls pays off: the user gets a 'snapshot' of the current
status of their world of objects.  If they write a for loop to turn every
object green, they will see each object turn green in sequence.

I think this is the kind of advantage you can get from interfacing Python
directly with the rendering system, rather than using a separate
application -- immediate feedback.    And to students trying to grasp
difficult OO concepts, immediate feedback is both helpful and engaging.

Dustin

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|                         Dustin Mitchell                )O(        |
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