Teaching Mathematics Distribution: world 3361

Frank Buss

Nifty. One of the professors at my university, teaching signal analysis, is also a rock musician and he's often bringing an electrical guitar and other equipment into the clbuttes for demonstrating physics and fourier analysis. But I think I'll go for graphics this time. The pupils are just kids, having very poor knowledge of mathematics yet. They certainly don't know anything about sinus functions and fourier analysis yet. Maybe I'll do the sound demonstrations another time :-)

Someone set the followup-to header to the linux group, so much of the discussion so far have only been available there. I think I will demonstrate some "turtle-graphics", like it was used in the good old Logo language, but I will use python for demonstrating it. The disadvantage is that I won't use the coordinate system much, one of the things I should go through.

I will demonstrate a line procedure (not related to turtle graphics, but just to remind them how the coordinate system works), then a triangle procedure based on the line procedure, then the turtle graphics (forward, left, back, right, etc), a turtle-based polygon procedure (I just decided to make lisp-style tail recursion instead of an iterative while-loop), and finally I have made a quick implementation of an animated triangle moving sideways at constant speed and falling with the gravity, bouncing of the walls. With enough fantasy and enough time, I'm sure it could be possible to develop more on the latter, and make it into an old-fashionated arcade game :-)