[Edu-sig] Update from PDX

[kirby urner]

I'm continuing to insinuate my Pythonic hypertoons as a
part of our "mental geometry" component, a supplement
to the much more hyped "mental arithmetic" some teachers
think calculators have messed with.

Computers help with both, through drill and practice (e.g.
Mathblasters), and Python is a great development language
in this regard (Pygame, VPython...).

My meeting with Ki Master George as his Saturday Academy
mentor, re Django and/or developing a user-friendly tutorial
around Civ IV/Python bindings was fruitful, though neither
project seems ISEFy enough (he's aiming towards the
compsci section of that well known science fair).

We met at the Starbucks on Holgate, his dad also very
much a part of these discussions (I like involving parents,
had a dad sit through much of my last Pythonic math
class, as chronicled in my blogs).

As background for compsci, I recommended some of the
following readings:

In Code (Flannery)
Cryptonomicon and In the Beginning... (Stephenson) and
New Kind of Science (Wolfram)

thinking a "pure compsci" approach leads to projects around:

(a) cryptography and/or
(b) cellular automata.

At least those are both still-promising and fertile areas, no?

I continue networking with the gnu math teachers on getting
our kits ready for this summer.  We plan to fan out across
the country, giving little dog and pony shows here and there
regarding what we call "gnu math" and/or "design science."
It's a lot more hands-on and computer literate than what
passes for math class today.

Link trailhead:
http://www.mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=1558459&tstart=0

Kirby
4D Solutions