Gregor Lingl wrote:
> Andre schrieb:
> > Gregor Lingl wrote:
> >
> >> Hi educators!
> >> ...
> > Very nice!   I tried about 10 demos and they all performed very well,
> > except for the muorhuhn game which did not work at all (at least, not
> > from the demo viewer).
> >
> Thanks for your interest. I found the error:
> Please rename the file
> landscape.gif to landschaft.gif
>
Done, and it works.  I had played before with some other version of
moorhuhn.  My first reaction in trying yours was: "The mouse handling
makes it clumsy and a bit difficult, and the "other" moorhuhn I played
with was *much* better.  Then it dawned on me that this was a
*fantastic* demo that went well beyond what is normally possible for
turtle graphics.  (It was so good, I had forgotten what I was using!)

(reading again what I wrote above, it may give the wrong impression,
but I am not sure how to say it.  I would not have expected to see
something as good as this within a turtle module; it really took me by
surprise!)

[snip]
> >
> Thanks for your friendly judgment. I can understand you, as I also would
> like to have a closer
> look at rur-ple, but couldn't find the time to do so, when I was working
> on xturtle.py

I hope you find the time as I like to get feedback (both positive and
negative).  I'm getting very close to releasing version 1.0, after
which I'm likely to take a break from it.  (I may release version 0.9.9
tonight!)

I believe that one of the main strengths of rur-ple are the lessons.
Turtle graphics environment are nice, but without a set of lessons, I
don't think they can be used to their full potential by the average
teacher.  (Of course, I imagine that your book is sufficient for German
readers.)

> I've also had a short glance at crunchy frog (now it has some graphics
> support) and I wonder
> if it could be adapted to xturtle.py - namely because there is a
> relativly small interface,
> the class TurtleScreenBase, which has to be implemented to get all of
> the turtle module
> to some graphics tool. Perhaps I'll examine this in the near future.
> What's your opinion?

I think it might be both quite difficult and very easy to make crunchy
frog and xturtle work together in a seemless fashion.  (I know, it's a
contradiction.)

Difficult:
In crunchy frog, graphics are currently created by translating
user-written python code
into javascript that is drawing within an html <canvas> (supported by
Firefox, Safari and Opera but not currently supported by Internet
Explorer, although there are ways to make it work).  The graphics
created are static ones.  It is possible to do some animation using
javascript but I don't know of an easy way to translate python code
into javascript and do the kind of animation required for turtle
graphics.  [I believe it will be different for rur-ple type of
graphics, as the robot moves by discrete steps, and one can use the
javascript timeout function to create such animations.  This is
something I plan to explore this summer.]

Very easy:
Crunchy frog is designed as a conduit between a regular html page and a
"Python back-end".  The idea is to use html forms (or ajax based
interaction) to send python code to the back end, and display the
result back within the web page.  One extension I want to work on soon
(and I've done a quick and dirty working pygame prototype a while ago)
is to launch an external Python process that way.  What I would see is
simply to launch an xturtle program (tkinter based) from the
"crunchified" web page.   This appears to be very easy!

What we really need are html-based lessons that crunchy frog could
display and that contain suggested exercise for the reader.  The user
could type in the required code on the webpage, click a button and see
the xturtle program launched.  In some ways, Crunchy Frog is akin to
Leo, the literate programmer (as suggested originally by Knuth), where
the user-written documentation is mixed in with the Python code.   The
difference here is that the documentation (tutorials) is supplied by
the "teacher" to be displayed by Crunchy Frog which is then used as a
simple Python editor (or, rather, as an Integrated Learning
Environment, including other features like easy handling of doctest as
teaching tools).

I would *love* to have some sample xturtle lessons to bundle (together
with xturtle.py) with the next Crunchy Frog release.  If you can write
a sample lesson for beginning Python users that includes suggested
exercise, I could take care of the rest.
(A German lesson, together with an English translation would be great
as Crunchy Frog needs to be adaptable to other languages - if you
supply such a lesson, provided it is short enough, I will even
translate it into French. ;-)

Regards,

André


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