[Edu-sig] Announcement: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist -- Interactive Edition

[Carl Cerecke]

Looks good. Nice work.

How about exercises in a similar style to codingbat.com? That would be
really valuable I think.

Cheers,
Carl.

On 27 August 2011 02:23, Brad Miller <millbr02 at luther.edu> wrote:

>  Hello,
>
> As part of my Sabbatical this past year I've been working on a new edition
> of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (by Elkner et. al) with my
> colleague David Ranum.  The idea behind this new edition is to make it
> interactive, to encourage students to learn by doing and to explore.  The
> three main features we've added to previous editions are:
>
>    - Videos:  Each section has (or will have) a 5-10 minute screencast
>    explaining the written concepts verbally.
>    - Interactive Python interpreter.  Using Skulpt -- an open source
>    javascript implementation of Python.
>    - Codelens code visualizer -- Based on the Online Python Tutor by
>    Philip Guo this element allows students to step forward and backward through
>    the code and to see the values of variables
>
> To make it easy to add these features I wrote 3 new sphinx directives, so
> adding the interactive code features is not onerous.  When we finish our
> last pass through the book, we'll make all the code available on bitbucket.
>
> We'll be using this book in our introductory course this fall at Luther,
> and adding more videos as we move through the semester.
>
> You can take a look at our work here:  http://thinkcspy.appspot.com
>
> You'll need a gmail account to access the book. You'll also need a modern
> browser that supports html5, the interactive features rely heavily on
> Javascript and the canvas element.  (Safari, Firefox 6, Chrome) The reason
> is that the interactive code allows you to save your changes and reload them
> again later.  I've added an administrative back-end to the book so that we
> can have students do homework right in the browser.  I'd love to hear your
> feedback and ideas for other interactive features.
>
> Brad
>
> --
> Brad Miller
> Associate Professor, Computer Science
> Luther College
>
>
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