Greetings edu-siggers -- I'm supposed to be enroute to the gym already, but am having trouble assembling all parts of my costume, so side-tripping into "cyberia" again.
Just blogged re the tetrakaidecahedron -- how many others did that today? Given how many millions of blogs, probably a few (hey, Zeitgeist, ya know?). Just registered for Pycon I wanted to say. Looking forward. So, on the math teaching front, I've been facilitating connections twixt Alaska and Oregon, charter school stuff, will maybe blog about it more down the road (too much in play at the moment, not worth trying to capture in prose at this point (LEP High has a lot of spanking new Edubuntu terminals, that much I'll mention)). So yeah, on the one hand: energy (what the physics and chemistry teachers feel on board with, as a unifying concept, with power = E/t and so on -- talking units, Newtonian Era stuff). On the other hand: algorithms, such as execute on a computer, be that an XO, or (in older jargon) a human being. Of course as computer geeks, we believe in automating tedious grunt work (a lot of my job). We empathize with those monks and/or clerical staff told to work out inter- polation tables. "If only we had a machine" they would pray (so worried about typos, inaccuracies that could sink ships). Voila, Python (etc.). Prayers answered. On the energy front, I'm still thinking First Person Physics and looking forward to civilian action figures like Roz Savage, not fiction, not Rambo, featuring in our lesson plans, spending their hard earned calories like mad (she rowed across the Atlantic, mushed dawgs more recently) **. That's the true meaning of "action figure" in my book (like Lara Croft, but not tomb raiding -- so more like Lara Logan, or Angelina for real). On the algorithms front, we've got the emergin Algebra City curriculum i.e. that whole history of Zero coming by camel train through Baghdad (lots of value added), then by boat (merchant marine), to Italy, where that Pisa guy, Fibonacci, picks up our tale, gives us little two-liners, the kind of stuff we can use in Project Renaissance [tm] curriculum materials. I've gone through all that a million times on this list, so I'll spare you the redundancy, just exult a little more about Pippy on the XO, even if the Fibonaccis or Pascals aren't written as generators (an iterable type) in the current edition (always room to grow and change, now that G1G1 has pumped so much capital into it -- so many XOs around North America these days, especially in LA). OK, that's about it from my corner, unless anyone has questions. More later, see some of you at Pycon no doubt, Kirby 4D Solutions Portland, Oregon ** http://www.rozsavage.com/ """ I'm just in the process of developing an educational section for my website, in collaboration with a team at the University of Minnesota ( which is where I was dogsledding, not Alaska!). """ [ from today's inbox, good news ] _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
