[Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
Last Friday, I visited the MIT Science Fiction Society's library to pick up some books. While visiting, I spoke with a friend about our recently discovered mutual interest in Python in education. Upon hearing that he was unfamiliar with our work, I opened my XO, started Pippy, and left him to play for a few minutes. +1: This experience *rocked*: I can think of no other operating system which so directly brought his interest from theory to reality. Now, after playing with several Pippy examples, my friend stumbled onto XOlympics. In honor of the World Cup, I challenged him to game. After playing for some time -- perhaps 10 rounds -- we discovered that we had lost track of which ball was currently contested. We looked at one another for a moment and simultaneously exclaimed: we can fix this! +1: I can think of no other operating system and application which so directly exposes us to the possibility and desirability of making small changes. We sat down to fix the problem. Since no example was available for how to set the color of an already constructed ball, I had to go behind the scenes by grepping the Pippy source code. Then I was able to work out exactly what to do by several small experiments with dir() and with raise. -1: I think there's an important missing stepping stone here -- I'm not convinced that most people would have been able to figure out how to set the ball color from the currently available view-source interface and Pippy training materials. The final change consisted of six insertions to the XOlympics example. It was this long only because I decided to try something fancy -- smoothly interpolating the contested ball between two colors over time -- instead of something simpler. Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. Anyone have thoughts on what stepping stones Sugar and Pippy ought to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to describe and to share? Regards, Michael ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 03:39:46AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: After playing for some time -- perhaps 10 rounds -- we discovered that we had lost track of which ball was currently contested. Yes, I discovered that also in my testing of the example. We sat down to fix the problem. Since no example was available for how to set the color of an already constructed ball, I had to go behind the scenes by grepping the Pippy source code. Then I was able to work out exactly what to do by several small experiments with dir() and with raise. You discovered what I had discovered ... the example depends heavily on the Physics library bundled with Pippy. I got lost looking at the problem and gave up. But I did almost manage to convert the code to be screen resolution independent. See 4a50004 ... the winning round position check code has a FIXME attached, and I welcome input. -1: I think there's an important missing stepping stone here -- I'm not convinced that most people would have been able to figure out how to set the ball color from the currently available view-source interface and Pippy training materials. I agree. Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. Anyone have thoughts on what stepping stones Sugar and Pippy ought to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to describe and to share? Quandry: we'd want subsequent users of the examples to be challenged by the same problem, so why would we want to fix it for everybody? When editing the examples recently I saw several improvements that I could make but decided not to make them because I wanted the reader of the example to make the same mistake as part of their learning. Sharing in class context ... does this work? Can the journal entry be passed around? For merging the improvements as part of the Infinite_monkey_theorem, we would need to bring the change back from the user into the development community, and provide feedback to the user. We might not be able to depend on an e-mail path. So I envisage a small web application on sugarlabs.org that would provide these features: 1. submission of example improvements, which are inserted into a branch in a git repository, where the branch is named for the user, 2. status view of their submission branch, using a journal entry of a Browse bookmark, 3. download of other submission branches by users, 4. scoring and voting by other users. Is there a web application that does this kind of thing already? -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 06:07:50PM +1000, James Cameron wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 03:39:46AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. Anyone have thoughts on what stepping stones Sugar and Pippy ought to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to describe and to share? We might not be able to depend on an e-mail path. So I envisage a small web application on sugarlabs.org Both an email and a POST request could be tried - saving the entry to the journal might be good, which then opens up a whole other set of routes (and confusions) for submission/sharing (and its resultant UI challenges). To bikeshed a bit, perhaps share via email and/or share via web could become part of Activities' sharing options. Martin pgpFZI2UKznqp.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
I think all activities should have Report bug on the toolbar somewhere. And of course a system in place on the other end, perhaps email-to-trac? On 22 June 2010 14:25, Martin Dengler mar...@martindengler.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 06:07:50PM +1000, James Cameron wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 03:39:46AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. Anyone have thoughts on what stepping stones Sugar and Pippy ought to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to describe and to share? We might not be able to depend on an e-mail path. So I envisage a small web application on sugarlabs.org Both an email and a POST request could be tried - saving the entry to the journal might be good, which then opens up a whole other set of routes (and confusions) for submission/sharing (and its resultant UI challenges). To bikeshed a bit, perhaps share via email and/or share via web could become part of Activities' sharing options. Martin ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 02:36:42PM +0100, Lucian Branescu wrote: I think all activities should have Report bug on the toolbar somewhere. And of course a system in place on the other end, perhaps email-to-trac? Good idea, but why make every activity implement this? I think a bikeshed icon in the frame would be better. I plan to release one on April 1, 2011. Martin pgpMBmHLA8eLG.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 02:41:04PM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 02:36:42PM +0100, Lucian Branescu wrote: I think all activities should have Report bug on the toolbar somewhere. And of course a system in place on the other end, perhaps email-to-trac? Good idea, but why make every activity implement this? I think a bikeshed icon in the frame would be better. I plan to release one on April 1, 2011. HHOS. And I'm not sure what colour the icon should be. pgpQQ1u3Zzgcm.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
I can think of no other operating system which so directly brought his interest from theory to reality. +1: I can think of no other operating system and application which so directly exposes us to the possibility and desirability of making small changes. I agree (as well) Anyone have thoughts on what stepping stones Sugar and Pippy ought to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to describe and to share? Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. Ok, I'm a little confused here. There are two perspectives to this. One perspective is experienced developers hacking pippy/python examples and submitting suggestions/improvements and the other is concerning people (primarily students) learning python; experimenting, learning and sharing. Am I correct in assuming that we're discussing the latter here? For merging the improvements as part of the Infinite_monkey_theorem, we would need to bring the change back from the user into the development community, and provide feedback to the user. We might not be able to depend on an e-mail path. So I envisage a small web application on sugarlabs.org that would provide these features: 1. submission of example improvements, which are inserted into a branch in a git repository, where the branch is named for the user, 2. status view of their submission branch, using a journal entry of a Browse bookmark, 3. download of other submission branches by users, 4. scoring and voting by other users. Excellent suggestion. I'd go one step further and suggest developing a simple interface within Pippy that can communicate with the web server/application and implement the features listed above. -- Anish Mangal On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 1:37 PM, James Cameron qu...@laptop.org wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 03:39:46AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: After playing for some time -- perhaps 10 rounds -- we discovered that we had lost track of which ball was currently contested. Yes, I discovered that also in my testing of the example. We sat down to fix the problem. Since no example was available for how to set the color of an already constructed ball, I had to go behind the scenes by grepping the Pippy source code. Then I was able to work out exactly what to do by several small experiments with dir() and with raise. You discovered what I had discovered ... the example depends heavily on the Physics library bundled with Pippy. I got lost looking at the problem and gave up. But I did almost manage to convert the code to be screen resolution independent. See 4a50004 ... the winning round position check code has a FIXME attached, and I welcome input. -1: I think there's an important missing stepping stone here -- I'm not convinced that most people would have been able to figure out how to set the ball color from the currently available view-source interface and Pippy training materials. I agree. Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. Anyone have thoughts on what stepping stones Sugar and Pippy ought to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to describe and to share? Quandry: we'd want subsequent users of the examples to be challenged by the same problem, so why would we want to fix it for everybody? When editing the examples recently I saw several improvements that I could make but decided not to make them because I wanted the reader of the example to make the same mistake as part of their learning. Sharing in class context ... does this work? Can the journal entry be passed around? For merging the improvements as part of the Infinite_monkey_theorem, we would need to bring the change back from the user into the development community, and provide feedback to the user. We might not be able to depend on an e-mail path. So I envisage a small web application on sugarlabs.org that would provide these features: 1. submission of example improvements, which are inserted into a branch in a git repository, where the branch is named for the user, 2. status view of their submission branch, using a journal entry of a Browse bookmark, 3. download of other submission branches by users, 4. scoring and voting by other users. Is there a web application that does this kind of thing already? -- James Cameron http://quozl.linux.org.au/ ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 02:25:06PM +0100, Martin Dengler wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 06:07:50PM +1000, James Cameron wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 03:39:46AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. Anyone have thoughts on what stepping stones Sugar and Pippy ought to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to describe and to share? We might not be able to depend on an e-mail path. So I envisage a small web application on sugarlabs.org Both an email and a POST request could be tried - saving the entry to the journal might be good, which then opens up a whole other set of routes (and confusions) for submission/sharing (and its resultant UI challenges). To bikeshed a bit, perhaps share via email and/or share via web could become part of Activities' sharing options. Martin There is presently a peer-to-(multiple)peer sharing app from SL called FileShare. One person starts it, makes a public session in the Neighboorhood, share a document, then others can join this and then download that document to the Journal. -- | .''`. == Debian GNU/Linux ==.| http://kevix.myopenid.com..| | : :' : The Universal OS| mysite.verizon.net/kevin.mark/.| | `. `' http://www.debian.org/.| http://counter.li.org [#238656]| |___`-Unless I ask to be CCd,.assume I am subscribed._| ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
On 22 Jun 2010, at 14:36, Lucian Branescu lucian.brane...@gmail.com wrote: I think all activities should have Report bug on the toolbar somewhere. And of course a system in place on the other end, perhaps email-to-trac? Would be great if the Log functionality for uploading log files to a server could be fleshed out and brought back to life (though I never got to see it working originally). We could then direct testers there to get more actionable bug data rather than cluttering up every activity with an additional tool. Regards, --Gary On 22 June 2010 14:25, Martin Dengler mar...@martindengler.com wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 06:07:50PM +1000, James Cameron wrote: On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 03:39:46AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote: Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. Anyone have thoughts on what stepping stones Sugar and Pippy ought to provide to make this act of reflection and sharing feel as natural as the act of starting Pippy or of making the change that we want to describe and to share? We might not be able to depend on an e-mail path. So I envisage a small web application on sugarlabs.org Both an email and a POST request could be tried - saving the entry to the journal might be good, which then opens up a whole other set of routes (and confusions) for submission/sharing (and its resultant UI challenges). To bikeshed a bit, perhaps share via email and/or share via web could become part of Activities' sharing options. Martin ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
Here, we reach the end of my tale. You see, my friend and I agreed that our desired next step would be to send our change to sugar-devel@ along with, well, this story. -1: Unfortunately, there's no obvious way to do this with Sugar and Pippy today. I don't want to spoil the party, but what are you going to do if that works and kids from around the world start bombarding sugar-devel with their changes? I've heard the term success disaster used for problems like this. The idea is that you can ignore a potential problem for now because if something like that really does become a serious problem, that's because the project as a whole was successful and (somehow) it will have picked up adequate resources to fix the problem. Still, I'd be happier if we avoided scaling problems as much as possible. -- These are my opinions, not necessarily my employer's. I hate spam. ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
It might also be worth thinking about how this would play out in Squeak/Etoys. See in particular: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Smalltalk_Development_on_XO#Submit_your_changes --scott attempting to learn from the community ps. as bert's doing the only multitouch work (that I know of) I've given some thought recently to what Sugar II would look like if it were totally implemented in Squeak/Etoys. Why not? --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
Re: [Sugar-devel] A Tale of Sugar and Pippy
Hi, I don't want to spoil the party, but what are you going to do if that works and kids from around the world start bombarding sugar-devel with their changes? I should think some kind of party would be in order. :) - Chris. -- Chris Ball c...@laptop.org One Laptop Per Child ___ Sugar-devel mailing list Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
