<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> Hi, Sebastian You must remember that I am an old curmudgeon. For me, simplicity was programming in assembler as opposed to typing in octal code. I entered a more complex world with Fortran and Cobol, simplified by Basic. Programs for the IBM 1401 started at position 333 since the only operating system was a load button and the only debugging tool was a button that dumped memory contents to a printer. Every program we wrote was complete. Today, there are few programmers who have ever written anything more complicated that 'Hello World' as a complete program. Today, virtually all programming is 'own code' to a pre-existing program. I think that the phrase 'own code' is now part of a curmudgeon's history - in the day it meant a subroutine written to be used in an existing program. My main concern with full IDEs is that the user may not be able to write a real program to execute in a real environment. On the other hand, the beginning programmer shouldn't get bogged down in boilerplate. The programming languages have essentially no boilerplate (shebang?). It is a web page that requires a fixed skeleton. However, Richa's solution hides that from the user. It can't be completely hidden since the learner needs to know how to build a web page independently of the tool. This is covered by the Pocket HTML lessons. The Explore section of the School Server content is organized in the form of a course with units and lessons. Amazingly, it now includes not one, not two, but three programming languages: Python, Javascript, and Shell Scripting. Javascript is intended to build on a knowledge of HTML and CSS although the text, Eloquent Javascript actually introduces Javascript as a programming language and connects it to the web only in the second part (the third introduces node.js). Incidentally, the course based on Eloquent Javascript provides a 'take no mercy' approach to introducing all of these essential programming concepts. I am sure it would not be available to our students without Richa's tool. Anyone who fully understands the concepts in this text is 'good to go' at any level of programming. The first prerequisite course, introduces the Terminal Activity, the file system, and the nano text editor. With this basis, the learner has a basis for saving programs and web pages as files and executing them from the command line (or displaying in the Browse activity with <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="file://">file://</a> and a path. The courses Terminal 1 and Terminal 2 (from William Shotts - <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php">http://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php</a>) continues into more on the shell and writing shell scripts. My curmudgeon past also included putting the programs from David Ahl's Basic Computer Games (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://atariarchives.org/basicgames/">http://atariarchives.org/basicgames/</a>) on a Commodore 64. The first Python course from Al Sweigart's Invent Your Own Computer Games With Python (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://inventwithpython.com/">http://inventwithpython.com/</a>) shows how to program similar text games in Python. The second Python course from Al Sweigart's Hacking Secret Ciphers With Python is also introductory and text-based but in the domain of cryptography. The third course also based on a book by Al Sweigart, Making Games with Python and Pygame, depends on the material covered in the first two courses. WIth regard to the proposed fourth Python course, you are right on target. However, the introduction to Pygame does not relate it to objects. An important goal to this course is to develop understanding of these essential programming concepts: programming to an event-driven environment and organizing a large program to be understood for ease of maintenance and debugging. An important corollary is learning to read programs written by others. I think that Hello World is a good starting point since the learners will have already built Hello World as a standalone program. This allows the discussion to focus on what is required to run it as a Sugar Activity. For example, despite the complex folder that is the HelloWorld activity, everything is boilerplate except the 'activity.info' and 'activity.svg' files. The 'HelloWorld' Python program is in activity.py file. There the actual label('Hello World') is one line as print 'Hello World!' is in the original. This presents the opportunity to explain the rest of the file in the Sugar context. This also gives a good incentive for the learner to convert the Toolbar code to a module The BlockParty activity has been a favorite (I like Tetris), but it demonstrates a technique to build the activiity as a standalone executable file (__main__) and yet have it called by the framework in the Sugar context. This, of course, is a valuable capability of Python. This can motivate the learner to learn how to make the Python programs from Swegart's texts into Sugar activities. One unavoidable boilerplate issue in this course is the difference between sugar and sugar3. Given the direction of later Sugar builds, this topic is inevitable. The course will also have to cover olpcgame as a wrapper to pygame. The course will also include challenges to work with and improve Sugar Activities from ASLO. One example is converting Toolbars to the new standard. Another is fixing activities with Hulahop to use webkit or WebKit. At a more difficult level, fix InfoSlice to access the wikipediae on the school server. One section of the course should be to build a 'collaborative' Sugar activity. For example, convert a two player game where both players play on the same XO to one where the players are on different XOs. I hope to show how to make a 'king of the hill activity' where the two players play the game and others watch. The loser becomes a watcher and the longest waiting watcher becomes the challenger. Tony <div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 03/15/2015 02:39 AM, Sebastian Silva wrote: </div> <blockquote cite="mid:55048062.9000103@fuentelibre.org" type="cite"> <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"> I find this discussion very interesting. It is hard for me not to think of a full IDE like creature when thinking of the jsfiddle tool. Perhaps I'm failing to see exactly the point or the inteded "Use Case". On my side, as a self-taught-as-a-child programmer, I appreciate abstraction layers very much because they allow me to think of the actual thing I want to implement. What I do not appreciate is boilerplate code. To really understand Hello World activity, you must understand some basic concepts of Object Orientation, the notion of what is GTK, event-driven programming, etc. Even Hello Web carries a lot of boilerplate with it. In my humble opinion it's not so bad when the boilerplate code is not seen (i.e. part of the toolchain, or at least, in a template). Perhaps we've exhausted the discussion and it will come to a matter of the design chosen by the implementors for its first iteration. Perhaps it's a good time to remember our core design ideas: Simplicity, Collaboration, Reflection, and try to apply them to this design. Sounds like a fun project. Regards, Sebastian <div class="moz-cite-prefix">El 11/03/15 a las 00:34, Richa Sehgal escibió: </div> <blockquote cite="mid:CAPYWsU9LE7G6GcausU5Y8rVaTk+ZM_-8Ew+CTKi2Mrd7OG2+sA@mail.gmail.com" type="cite"> <div dir="ltr">Hi, Regarding inclusion of libraries such as Jquery, maybe we can let students create templates which we can save in their web folders. The objective is the following: As Tony mentioned, providing them with templates might not make them learn the basics, but essential parts of programming. For example, in my initial days of coding, I used Eclipse which started a new file in a nice template. During my first exam, I realized that I have forgotten the signature of the function main (the arguments type and number of arguments). Since then, for any new language that I pick up, I start from scratch. So what we can do is that students can create templates for shortcuts, but at least they would have some hands-on experience. This can then serve like what Sebastian mentions. As for the performance, after we develop the tool, we can do a performance benchmark and publish the numbers for different libraries, and CSS functionalities. These numbers can also be used by other developers as the basis for their algorithms, and we can see how to improve on them and also study how they change as XO and Sugar evolves. Thanks Richa</div> <div class="gmail_extra"> <div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 5:05 PM, Tony Anderson <<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:tony_anderson@usa.net" target="_blank">tony_anderson@usa.net</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi, Sebastian I am using Zim Desktop Wiki to reformat the book into digestible lessons (actually done). This makes it all html. My plan is to put this on the school server so that a student can download a chapter to view locally while working on it. I added a button to the Browse toolbar that displays a Journal object chooser and then displays the selected Journal object - a zip file which contains the web site in a compressed folder. I also provide a prerequisite course introducting the Terminal Activity and the nano editor. The model is that students would have a directory in /home/olpc/Documents named web. This directory would be used to hold thier web pages. At some point when they learn about links, they can set up a main page with links to the others. All of this is accessible from the Browse activity by <a moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="file:///home/olpc/Documents/web/index.html">file:///home/olpc/Documents/web/index.html</a>. The student should learn to add jquery by reference in the head of their web page. The actual js files can be downloaded from the school server (or installed with Sugar by usb stick). One problem with ide approaches is that it hides some of what we are trying to have the students learn. For example, I seriously considered using pippy to teach Python, but concluded that it would hide how to save Python programs, how to make them executable, and how to share them. In a course on making Sugar Activities, pippy can actually export the python code in a Sugar Activity wrapper, but what does the student learn about the construction of a Sugar Activity from that? I would rather they begin with the HelloWorld Activity. I have used a localhost for years with no problem. Since switching from Firefox to Webkit, I haven't been using it but primarily because I haven't tried to implement the features that required it. I am not sure it will be relevant at the intial web level. In any case, jquery did not cause any performance problems on an XO1. As regards Webkit, my concern is that in the Browse Activity it does not seem to support flexible boxes, the modern way to do web layout, and in many ways the key to reponsive web design. Tony <div> <div class="h5"> On 03/10/2015 10:11 PM, Sebastian Silva wrote: </div> </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <div> <div class="h5"> El 10/03/15 a las 04:58, Tony Anderson escibió: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I am working on a course based on Pocket HTML (<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://www.goer.org/HTML/" target="_blank">http://www.goer.org/HTML/</a>) which is available via CC. At the javascript level, I think Eloquent Javascript would be a good base and is also CC. </blockquote> Hi Tony, This is wonderful. I have had my eye on that tutorial ever since I started to think about Web activities a long time ago. My first attempt at a Web Activity was called WebSDK and was an IDE for doing web apps [1]. Those were old-style web apps, the ones that had a Python mini-server running in the background. I still consider this a good approach to access Python infrastructure from Javascript, but I'm not sure how (or if) the new Web API infrastructure has replaced this mechanism. I think, in any case, for a GSOC student working on dev tools for JS on Sugar, should consider the entire IDE scenario, not just the "fiddle" part. I.e. it should be possible to deploy a mini app (or content!) from this activity. About embedding JQuery and other libraries, I would favor a "Wizard" approach. I.E. a form that will allow you to have a basic project from a template (w/ or without optional toys such as Jquery). I like the hand-holding approach especially since low performance machines can't do multi-tasking very well (so looking up docs is not easy). Therefore a version of the JS tutorial that Tony referenced would be great to have embedded, IMHO, or included somehow. (Tony do you have an offline copy?) In order to avoid slow pages on older machines, including XO, it should be super lightweight, i.e. utilizing as little CSS3, transformations, transparency, SVG rendering, and animation as possible. At least a couple of templates should be able to run on the XO1 without issues. Hopefully some profiling feedback would be shown inline during development (such as at least load time for the "fiddle"). Also, there are wrappers for web activities for versions of Sugar that don't include the Web Activities framework. Maybe include those as options in the templates. Finally, a good editor goes a long way for a good development environment (I used Ace editor component and it ran well on XO1, back in the day). The way I think of this is that you should be able to develop something relatively basic without resorting to the Internet either for sensible libraries or their respective documentation. If done really well, perhaps we could even offer an alternative to Pippy and Develop? Finally, I don't think the Webkit or even old Firefox rendering engine are a severe limitation. It's not worse than targetting Internet Explorer 6 and most web developers had to do that only a couple of years ago. I suggest you download Firefox 3.6 (from like 10 years ago) as that is the rendering engine found on Sugar 0.94 and limit yourself by what it can do. I havben't looked for a reference browser for the Webkit1 engines, except Browse itself. It would be good to find out what our current engine equivalent is and document it (along with more contributions) to <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://developer.sugarlabs.org/" target="_blank">http://developer.sugarlabs.org/</a> Regards and good luck. [1] <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://somosazucar.org/files/2011/07/WebSDK1.png" target="_blank">http://somosazucar.org/files/2011/07/WebSDK1.png</a> <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://somosazucar.org/files/2011/07/WebSDK2.png" target="_blank">http://somosazucar.org/files/2011/07/WebSDK2.png</a> </div> </div> . </blockquote> </blockquote> </div> </div> </blockquote> </blockquote> </body> </html>