[Edu-sig] News about turtle graphics

[francois schnell]

On 23/06/06, Gregor Lingl <glingl at aon.at> wrote:
>
> Hi educators!
>
> One of the hardest problems I've encountered upto now
> is to decide, when a piece of software is ready to be
> be published.


Hello,

Well, I don't know but if it can help I've just jogged with a podcast
conference (IT conversations podcast feed) saying that:

"Great quyote from Michael Goldfarber, the Einstein of Attention. "The best
guarantee for attention is living your life as openly as possible,
expressing yourself as publicly as possible as early as possible."
Information attracts attention: to get attention, you need to give
information. Receiving information makes you influential. There's a
definition we came to that suggests that influence is the amount of
attention you get relative to the amount of attention you give."
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/03/etech_seth_goldstein.html


I've decided, that my new turtle graphics module ready
> now. A package, which additionally contains some
> example scripts. a tiny demoViewer and some documentation
> can be downloaded from:
>
> http://ada.rg16.asn-wien.ac.at/~python/xturtle


Wow !
- The demos are great.
- The doc is very clear and I like to have everything in one page (helps me
to find quickly what I search for through a "search")


>From now on it's the user community, which will largely
> determine the future development of the module. I hope
> that it will grow to more than one user (which is me)
> soon. (*)


I gave a quick test to the module and I'm already having fun to enslave your
turtles to a liberlab board ( http://www.liberlab.net/ ) :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/frenchy/173828694/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/frenchy/173828762/

And I'm willing to continue development (preferably
> in cooperation with others) until it's considered a really
> useful tool by the community.
>
> In my opinion it should replace the current turtle.py in
> the standard distribution. We will see if others join
> me in this respect ...


Well I'm voting for your module but my influence here is Null ;)

(Please note, that xturtle.py is a complete reimplementation
> of what I've shown to you some ten weeks ago.)
>
> For now I'll not write too much about it, but ask you for
> feedback and contributions to a discussion about the module.
> (You'll find some more information on the webpage mentioned
> above!)


Just one thing I messed with : I didn't succeed to set the heading with a
.gif picture (as a turtle)

ie if I do something like (t1 is my turtle):

t1.addshape("mypict.gif")
t1.shape("mypict.gif")

t1.setheading(myangle)

=> everything is fine but the .gif pict. itself doesn't turn.

On the contribution side I'm interested to translate the doc in French.

Question: I didn't see any informations about the licencing (and I can't
access your website for now which seems down), do you already have a plan
for that ?

However, I'll give a talk at Europython 2006 on July 5th about:
>
> xturtle - an extended turtle module for Python as a vehicle
> for teaching programming concepts.


After having the chance to meet Papert and reading his books I do think the
concepts behind the turtle geometry (and Logo) are really powerful. I'm glad
all this have a new great chance in a web era through the MIT One Laptop Per
Child program (Logo came in a pre-web era).

Concerning Europython, I'll finally be able to come. I'll also  take a
liberlab board if you want to see your turtles "jumping" around.

For this, too, your feedback will be welcome. And you'll get
> back the slides of the talk ;-)


I think it would be good if there is also a video or audio recording for
people who can't come.
I don't know if Europython will do that or what is their policy but I have a
reasonably good DV camcorder, then,  if there's no objections I could record
it and dump it on Google video (or whatever) if it's fine with you.
I could also do that for other conf. If people agree/want to.

I also saw that the education track begins only the last day. I would
appreciate to meet/identify the pysthonist people interested in education
before the last day (to learn from and drink a beer maybe ;) ), are their
other people following this list who will go to Europython 2006 ?

Thanks for making me having fun with your turtles.

cheers

francois

Regards,
> Gregor Lingl
>
> (*) This hope seems reasonable since I intend to use it in
> the forthcoming 2nd edition of "Python für Kids"
>
>
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