[Edu-sig] seasonal challenge to calculator dominance in high schools

[Wes Turner]

On Sunday, June 23, 2019, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Jun 23, 2019 at 12:57 PM Wes Turner <wes.turner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sunday, June 23, 2019, C. Cossé <ccosse at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I'll bet every one of those graphing calcs has also been replicated as a
>>> phone app
>>>
>>
>>> That's cool stuff there!  (yours)
>>>
>>
>> Yeah, that's really cool. Was the MoCap (motion capture) done at the
>> University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO)? They've a new Biomechanics facility
>> next to the soccer field over there.
>>
>>
> Thanks, I think the MoCap was done at a gait analysis lab, before facial
> recognition got so good (actually it's not either / or).  They'd like to
> know who that guy is over there on the camera based on his distinctive
> walk.  However the Dr. Fuller First Person Physics initiative piggy-backed
> on all that to study human motion as physics.  Turning on those contrails
> was maybe my idea.
>
>
Simulating glowstringing / poi seemed like a fun problem one day. Experts
would likely make light work of it for unknown returns.


> "First person physics" was my coin as far as Dr. Bob Fuller (no relation
> to Bucky) was concerned, and he made me webmaster for the project.
>

Hugo (Go, Markdown, ~Jupyter Notebook support) and Tinkerer (Python,
Sphinx, RST) work with GitLab Pages and GitHub + CI or probably the new
GitHub Actions. Jupyter-book or nbsphinx.


> There are a bunch of cool videos demoing simulated agents learning to walk
>> with evolutionary algorithms (mutation, crossover,  cost function)
>> https://github.com/openai/mujoco-py/blob/master/README.md#usage-examples
>>
>> https://youtube.com/results?search_query=openai+learning+to+walk
>>
>>
> Yes, my friend Gerald de Jong was a first adapter of "elastic interval
> geometry" where every "rod" is a tension-compression spring governed by
> mathematics.  He put creatures made as tensegrities in a simulation and
> selected for which was able to walk furthest, of course adding a concept of
> gravity + friction (traction).
>

TIL about Tensegrity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensegrity


> https://youtu.be/_II-uESToOs  (done in Java, Gerald an early adopter
> since JavaOne, when he came to visit me in Oregon on his way back)
>
> That's the same Gerald I cite in my online Google slides, who came up with
> a tetrahedron volume formula very like Euler's, but geared to give output
> in tetravolumes. I have it in Python.
>
>
> By comparison, my old offline graphing calculator is a frustrating piece
>> of work with no QWERTY keyboard.
>>
>>
> The issue is the personal workspace (PWS) and providing the ergonomics of
> at least a cubicle to people that young.  Once you're college age, you have
> a dorm with internet and library study carrels, we hope. But already you're
> going into debt for that.
>
> Babies don't know how to drive for Uber, if you know what I mean.
>

I fondly recall forming teams to teach part of a unit to our classroom
peers (with professional backup to fill the gaps). Prepare a lesson plan
and a non-boring presentation.


> Like how will the younger kids ever get the political clout they'll need,
> to get out of that "locker and tiny desk" rat race (eat lunch the nearby
> fast food places, how convenient!).
>

Long term in school suspension features cubicles and autonomy in some
districts.

John Taylor Gatto has a number of great books about learning vs education.


>
> How will they ever find time to develop a private stash of Jupyter
> Notebooks in such crowded crushing daycare centers?  Might as well be jail.
>

I should've created a git repo for everything on school day one. {README,
LICENSE, ...}

GH and GL have free private repos. GL has free CI for private repos.

How to reinforce that learning pays off over the short and long term.


>
> At the School of Tomorrow, I assume students are kicked back in private
> quarters, like in the movie (the kids each have their own room, not just
> the dome kid).
>

A captive audience!


>
> In building a table out of a rolling cart, 2x6's, a melamine sheet, and
>> some brackets, I had need for rigid body dynamics; to determine how much
>> force would cause the table to fall over. After not finding any existing
>> open source software with actual calculations and a few q&a questions with
>> some equations and parameters, I considered trying to add support to
>> FreeCAD (with cadquery and Jupyter Notebook) for rollover risk.
>>
>>
>
> I had a gig sharing CAD online with middle schoolers.  Not Blender.
> Something cloud.
>
> Even the schools using Macs found it slow going.  We had Chromebooks as
> backup.
>
> What was it called again?  I'm scanning through a plethora of free online
> tools and not finding it.
>
> Maybe it was the wifi connection that was slow.  I don't think 3D CAD is
> something you just learn in an hour.  The dashboard (GUI) is intimidating,
> even though this is a "dumbed down" version.
>

Cadquery + Jupyter Notebook has far less UI to learn (and procedural design)
https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery/blob/master/README.md#jupyter

https://github.com/bernhard-42/jupyter-cadquery/blob/master/README.md#b-example-cadquery-using-sidecar

The installation could be made easier with a few maintained conda-forge
packages and versions pinned in an environment.yml.


>
> We're all free to dream of our castle-in-the-sky curriculum (I certainly
> do that a lot) wherein the hardware problem has already been solved, but
> short of turning high rise floor space -- already used for cubicles -- into
> high schools, I'm not sure how to solve the problem.  Making them use itty
> bitty calculators or tiny computers is designing for claustrophobia.
>

Maybe VR and BCI? Someday. VNC within VR?

In highschool, We had flex classes: schedule n study halls and lectures per
week; with computers around the outer edges of the study hall locations.
With signup sheets posted on the wall (and no way to follow shared group
text messages such as microblogging services)


>
> One laptop per child (a goal, not an achievement yet), leads to a next
> question:  where do you plug it in and get some quality time with it, and
> the people reachable through it?  How do you keep it from being stolen
> and/or banned in your state?  You're relatively little, surrounded by
> bigger people who always think they know better.
>

At ~$150+, a Chromebook (with all of the data already in the cloud) is very
valuable to its registered owner.

There've got to be people somewhere who want to help kids who've had their
laptops stolen.


>
> Anyway, I think it's great we get to play with physics engines.
>
> Even Codesters, which I use a lot to teach Python (just signed up for more
> business), has primitive gravity and bounce effects you can toggle on and
> off.
>
> Not a full Python implementation (no yield statement, does include
> classes).
>

Does codesters have any features for grading?

https://www.codesters.com/?lang=en

Yup, Codesters has an integrated LMS and automated grading. Can it post
grades to e.g. Google Classroom?


>
> Kirby
>
>
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