At my upcoming workshop in Chicago I'm planning to stress the relevance of theater as *the* extended metaphor where scripting and browsing is concerned. JavaScript pulls the the strings of our DOM, the scenery or structure of the web page stage, while Servers are even further behind the scenes than backstage. They're remote, in the cloud, and help with keeping the AJAX goin', with JSON.
The fact that theater is ancient Greek and that we use words like "ajax" and "jason" is no accident. And this is where the mythical roots around Python come in, the familiar serpent and/or dragon atop a treasure trove, the database (say Oracle) in modern verbiage. Hobbits know this archtype, but then so did the ancient Greeks. Apollo actually attacks the Python in one chapter, chasing it away from Delphi, presumably to impose his dreary patriarchy in opposition to Athena's and her priestesses'. One would expect some Athena fan club to claim said Python as a mascot and even say it never died (such things are eternal dontcha know). I have evidence of such a cult. I should explain that the Python is believed to have lived in a cave under the temple at Delphi, the place you go for advice from the priestesses. Here's a scholarly passage: http://bit.ly/17i3akK (goes to Google books, probably *too* scholarly but what I could find at the moment, confirms the gist of the tale above). Anyway, that's to sort of set the stage. A more foreground story would be my reintroduction to lobbying in Oregon, when what was then called the Software Association of Oregon put some muscle behind testing the legislature regarding adding more of this "computer stuff" to the high school curriculum in a way that would help satisfy the math requirement.** A lot of kids were dreading Algebra II, having hated Algebra I and Geometry. You wouldn't need to be a genius to switch gears and start playing with the bash shell, accessing Python, a back door into LAMP. Something like I was already doing with Saturday Academy, with Hillsboro Police Dept. (West Precinct) a client. But I don't think it was the legislature per se that set up any roadblocks. It's just there's not much leverage in that world of mass textbook publishing. Vast funds have already been committed. Tilting at windmills. Live and learn. Make do with what you've got. Speaking of Algebra II, there's that article in this issue of Harper's about where we might be going with that. I had my own review in the Math Forum per usual (an old haunt of mine): http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=2591789 (as usual, I'm opinionated in this opinion column) The theme of the workshop is Leveraging Python and I think that dovetails nicely with Guido's CP4E and where are we now lo these many years later? To some extent the answers hinge on several ongoing debates about the shape of education. Some people maintain that programming traces back to humanities topics, such as scripting and play writing. If programming is to become more pervasive is this because of changes in math class or in language arts? A combination? Do we too easily give in to the idea of computing as "number crunching" whereas so often it's "pattern finding" -- more lexical and/or graphical than strictly numeric? Rhetorical question. Here's a recent sketch of the "theater" model for use in the classroom. Of course more gifted drawers than I will freely improve upon my humble rendering. http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirbyurner/9583829639/ Kirby ** An earlier exposure to Oregon lobbying was through my job as a client-server programmer working in FoxPro. Associated Oregon Industries (AOI) was my client and for awhile I was accustomed to seeing Salem more from that point of view. FoxPro's days were numbered though, and my career took me onward.
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