[Edu-sig] fyi. a published thesis, use of Python in class

[kirby urner]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 9:59 AM, Fotis Georgatos <gef at ceid.upatras.gr> wrote:
> Hello Kirby et al,
>
> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 5:46 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thank you Fotis, I have been reading this all morning, had not seen it
>> before.  Thank you for bringing it to my attention.
>
> My pleasure :)
>
> I just figured I haven't provided a URL for the .pdf document, too;
> so, here it is:
> http://arxiv.org/pdf/0809.1437v1
>
>> I've mostly documented by classroom work in my blogs, but usually in
>> connection with Saturday Academy, which doesn't compete to offer
>> transferable credits, only skills and its own credential, which does
>> count for something.  This is not the same as having an established
>> state school recognize Python as a good learning language.  I salute
>> the Pedagogical Institute for having some vision.
>
> In the name of accuracy, I'd like to point out that the Pedagogical Institute
> hasn't given a blessing -or contempt- about using the language at large scale.
> To their tribute though, they did grant license early on to conduct the research
> in the real environment, and there are sharp individuals there that understood
> the benefits very quickly; as well as the few colleagues that went all along.
> So, what happened under their auspices and guidance was the experiment.
> But, having people willing to experiment in an area that is new and unknown,
> and even do that in a fearless yet considerating way, yes, that was vision.

Kudos again.

< short_story >

In Oregon State we have this network of open source think tanks that
showcases through various venues, including the Hillsboro Police
Department, which set up a Linux Lab at West Precinct (Redhat based),
and invited in high school aged students for free training.

A motive for doing this:  police found themselves always "playing the
heavy" even with kids who maybe had done nothing wrong, asked into
classrooms to hammer home various lessons (entire curricula even)
focused on the illegality of copying, the dangers of chat rooms.

In the meantime, they saw all these young adults in open source having
gobs of fun, legally and safely, and not criminalizing the free
sharing of work.

How do we get kids from here to there?  Shouldn't the schools be doing
it?  But are they?

Given police have a big investment in living in a wholesome community
(anything else gets to be nightmarish, including for cops) they took
it upon themselves to do what schools mostly do not (or did not, it's
all changing pretty fast at this time).

As it turned out, the experiment was mostly a failure because
teenagers have a healthy fear of police stations and don't voluntarily
go there for schooling.  But their heart was in the right place, I
still believe.

My role in all this was as co-teacher subcontracted through Saturday
Academy (saturdayacademy.org), which gets some of its funding from the
Paul Allen group is my understanding (a Microsoft guy).

I tell this story about the police as a part of my informal
presentation to the London Knowledge Lab, that time Guido and I were
meeting with the Shuttleworth Foundation about stuff (Alan Kay also
present, although this summit was not about OLPC per se, was more
hardware agnostic, nor just about Python either, other communities
represented e.g. Scheme's).

http://www.lkl.ac.uk/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=72&Itemid=48

< /short_story >

>
> I hope now that the OLPC is a standard topic in the educational community
> and Python has got much extra publicity and popularity because of it,
> people here and elsewhere will be more willing to consider it as a
> learning vehicle.

I think Jython and the Google AppEngine, so many up to date libraries,
are what most excite some people about Python and its prospects.

Others think PyPy is the bees knees (lots discussion about PyPy at
Green Dragon after last PPUG meeting, which focused on Django on
Jython:  http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2008/09/ppug-200899.html

We all have our reasons to love the snake.

Sugar certainly shows Python's potential as a robust and rapid
development environment, although given I hang around Intel people
(near Hillsboro) I'm somewhat am used to hearing it dissed (this was
awhile ago by now -- haven't heard anything lately).

My focus has been Py3K and its ability to use Greek characters (for
example) as top-level names, for functions and classes (I've been
using Chinese in my examples) e.g.:
http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2008/05/chinese-names-in-python.html

> I'm not claiming that a transition to Python is going to happen quickly but,
> if I saw educators having it as a bold item in their mind, that would
> be progress!
>
> I wonder which country/ies would dare put the language as a recommendation
> in their country-wide curriculum, do we have any firsts in this area?
>
> cheers,
> Fotis

Here in the USA it's a political hot potato to speak in terms of any
"national curriculum" as we're too ethnically diverse to admit of such
a thing, but in each state there's some effort to come up with
"standards" (lots of cutting and pasting as bureaucrats employ open
source techniques to pad their websites).

Since Portland is considered an open source capital by some, it's a
congenial place in which to work with other parents in starting new
charter public schools not beholden to pre-existing curricula.  For
example our local LEP High runs on Edubuntu thanks to tech support
from Open Sourcery:  http://www.lephigh.org/
http://opensourcery.com/node/57

My own approach is to suggest that math teachers at the secondary
school level stop focusing on calculators as a rather antiquated idea
of "technology in the classroom" and get going on a curriculum more
suited to the needs of our local Silicon Forest employers.  We find
many teachers quite receptive to this thinking, so long as they get on
the job training.

Kirby

PS:  Vern, saw your +1 but looks like I'll need to take my proposal to
web site management, another list outside edu-sig (I used to be on
that list back when I set up the edu-sig page using cvs, pre the
reskinning and bright new look, switch to svn, and it was a terrible
spam storm of mostly bots politely rejecting one another's spam
rejection notices, oy!).