[math4] Class start-up

[Greg Dekoenigsberg]

On Sun, 8 Mar 2009, Stephen Jacobs wrote:

>> /me blinks.
>
> Yah, me too.  Gonna be quite the rollercoaster ride.  If they don't Want 
> to hang me by the end of the 10 weeks it'll be a good thing. I've 
> actually run courses like this before that do things like take 
> representatives from a couple of museums and have a class of students 
> Build virtual exhibitions for them in 10 weeks.  I did it from '95-01, 
> starting when we coded everything in HTML by hand up to doing Flash 
> sites before the museums were mostly capable of doing this stuff on 
> their own. The difference this time is I won't be teaching them Python, 
> e-toys or scratch, they'll need to do it on their own :-)
>
> The really encouraging thing is that if this takes off I'll have a good 
> base to build on, especially since or CS department will be 
> experimenting with teaching cs1-cs3 in Python next year :-)

THANK $DEITY.  :)

> Yah, will need buy-in from the community and the folks on this 
> (growing?) list to help us roll along

Well, I will be dragging as many people as I can to the party, rest 
assured of that.

>>> Graphical or text only? It might be helpful to shoot for a game that's
>>> as visual as possible, making it more portable across languages and
>>> cultures. Has there been much thought given to that as an option?
>>
>> Go download and play "Mines of Elderlore" now:
>>
>> http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Mines_of_Elderlore
>
> Will wait til tomorrow :-)
> But will get the students to look at it.
>
>> Now imagine that before successfully attacking any monster, or drinking 
>> a health potion, or performing some other important gameplay function, 
>> you must answer a question of some kind.  My emphasis was to find a 
>> Free Software codebase that was simple, in Python, already worked, and 
>> could be easily hacked.  Hacked being the key word there.
>
> Makes sense.  I'd like to see if me can move beyond straight questions 
> and have them solve graphic problems like aligning items in the right 
> geometrical forms to match a proof to do so.  Might do parallel 
> prototyping tracks in python and in either of the multimedia authoring 
> packages on the machine to look at the strengths and weaknesses of each 
> approach.

Yep.  Hacking the game flow should be pretty straightforward for coders 
with nominal skills; my hope is to have a bit of that work done Real Soon 
Now.  It's a turn-based game loop, so it shouldn't be too hard -- although 
it's proving a bit tricky for me.  But that might be because I haven't 
written any substantive game code in, oh, twenty years.  :)

> So it sounds like In addition to Eric's lecture I will have them 
> download the game you've pinpointed and start doing some BG research as 
> well.  Once we've done that we can get our heads around some design 
> concepts.

Brilliant.

--g

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