[Edu-sig] Repositioning SQL within K-16

[kirby urner]

Yesterday at Pauling House (a meeting place) I was sketching my vision
of how to get more "SQL savvy" out to more people.

The visiting CTO seemed unpersuaded, said SQL was archiac and you
couldn't model business intelligence in purely transactional systems,
but we'd only just met, I don't think he's as focused on K-16
curriculum writing as I am.  As I put it in my blog "SQL is old hat,
but we still need professionals with the skills and/or overview
vis-a-vis this technology." [1]

So a lot of you probably know that SQL is about creating tables,
storing, updating and retrieving data in those tables, related by
intersecting columns.  Until not so long ago, my story goes, SQL was a
high priest language as it only ran on million dollar mainframes, most
mom & pop (small) businesses had no need for such a thing.

Not surprisingly, the teaching literature tends to be very business
oriented in the sense of talking about parts in inventory, quantity
and price.

Like economists, they (the business school writers) talk about
"widgets" meaning "generic salable catalog item" (this all got started
well before software engineers actually implemented GUI widgets for
real, actually called something "a widget" and built businesses around
them, e.g. buy my closed source OCX calendar object and drag and drop
it onto your Visual Basic canvas, for only $29.95, free shipping).

The problem is I'm trying to insert more SQL into the grade school
mathematics curriculum, right about the time we're doing Venn
Diagrams, union and intersection of sets.  This "business flavor" of
widgets in inventory isn't "mathy" enough, leaves students and
teachers thinking they're on some pre-business track, whereas a lot of
these youngsters are looking at field work in biology or something.
It's premature to assume business, and yet not a bad investment, in
terms of time, plus SQL is used in field work, bioinformatics etc.

My solution (drum roll) is to switch to Polyhedra for subject matter,
rather like parts in inventory (they even stack up, some of 'em), with
the main table giving a possibly lengthy greek name, like esoteric
species of flora or fauna (more biological).  peda.com is an example
source of information, Web pages by George Hart and collaborators also
good.[2]

Where Python fits in is we want our math students to get it about
"transformations" between XYZ coordinates in say traditional OFF
format, and a VRML or POV-Ray scene description, i.e. the same
information, pulled via SQL, but then couched in an XML (x3D = new
VRML) or ray tracing script (also recently million dollar software
that ran only on mainframes but now accessible to any kid with a
desktop or laptop).

In addition to whatever server side transformations (implemented in
Python), we want to diagram / explain / show how a SQL engine backs a
website with pages assembled on the fly in response to an incoming
URL.

We don't store the HTML, we suck out the relevant data and build a
page, with a picture and everything, or we list results of queries,
SELECT statements, entered at the front end.

A simple web framework, WSGI scripts or whatever, everything open
source, transparent, will give kids a clue as to how their world
works, including all that parts and inventory stuff (like when
ordering a new video card from TigerDirect or whatever).  They build
it themselves, with help from teachers, pass the work down from year
to year, start new versions.

The school intranet becomes a source of culture, a living document and
portfolio of student work (students have some control over what of
theirs gets saved, vs. deleted if just a draft).

Now of course our math teachers are complaining at this point that
we've gone far afield and they're right.  This SQL database about
polyhedra is on the school intranet let us imagine, one among several,
and students use it in art class, chemistry class, lots of places
besides math.

Geographic information systems show gem stones, where this or that
type is more prevalent.

So in math class we're maybe more interested in the duals table
(relates each poly to its unique dual) and the XYZ coordinates, if
that's how they're stored (I've used quadrays in some of my FoxPro
implementations, got an article in FoxPro Advisor about that).[3]  In
science class we might be looking at crystal lattices and pull up
pictures of polyhedra in that context instead (same database,
different subject area).

Math classes definitely need to be using x3D and some ray tracing, if
spatial geometry is on the agenda at all.  This presumes vectors, the
usual pre linear algebra content, and if we're using a "math objects"
approach, we definitely get to those, complete with __add__ and scalar
__mul__ per Gibbs-Heaviside (overloading special names, used
interactively in shell mode as well as in scripts).

All of the above may be implemented as student led projects, teachers
as managers, including with some XP techniques if that's what your
school is into, not speaking for all of them.

You don't need an exhaustive table of hundreds of polyhedra, or even
if your school has that, hand doing a small set, maybe just the
Platonics, is enough to start doing an inner join or two, running a
ray tracer.

The point is to get some hands on experience even before college, with
what are still the tools of many a trade, from show biz to
neurochemistry.

The same approach works after high school as well, but I think we'll
want to get started as soon as students feel ready, let them set the
pace, like so what if they're only like age 12 in China, it's not up
to me to make all the rules, I'm not some Olympian head honcho.

I'm a big believer in organic growth, community gardens i.e. we want
"SQL savvy" to take root indigenously, not show up at the door as some
"must study me" imposed module.

The technology is all freely available, don't have to go with
polyhedra, but in the interests of efficiency, optimization, I'm
suggesting that'd be a smart investment for any school, with all the
raw materials already free and open source.

Kirby
4D

PS:  an excellent main table could be the Waterman Polyhedra, which I
named for Steve Waterman.  These are convex polys carved from the CCP
matrix, such that every vertex is the center of a CCP within radius
maximum, i.e. its the maximum convex hull for each ball-to-ball
sweepout radius.  The bigger ones are especially beautiful, though not
every SQL group would want to bother storing them (vs. generating
efficiently -- given the symmetries you only need to store like a 12th
of the vertices).[4]

[1]  http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2008/08/wanderers-2008816.html
[2]  http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/%7Eanthony/graphics/polyhedra/archimedean_duals/triakisicosahedron.jpg
by Anthony Thyssen, with data from George Hart
[3]  http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/quadrays.html
[4]  http://watermanpolyhedron.com/watermanpolyhedra1.html
http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/geometry/waterman/gen/index.html