Re: [Openexvis-devel] Participation

[Tero K. <te...@us...>]

Leonardo Santagada wrote:
> 2005/7/20, Tero Kuusela <te...@us...>:
>>Hi, Leonardo!
>>
>>The project was at a standstill for about 10 days since I was busy being
>>an organizer at DebConf5[0]. I've been studying some things as hinted by
>>my mentor, David Ascher, and have done some planning. I'll write
>>something about my current ideas to the project website so you can
>>provide some valuable feedback ;)
> 
> Be sure I will.

There's now something here:
http://openexvis.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

Go take a look and let me know what you think. I suggest looking through
it before reading the rest of this mail.

> I can already teel you what I think about Jeliot. The program seens
> nice, but I don't really think that the user want to see every math
> operation animated or at least this should be configurable. What I
> would like to do is make a presentation file, where you configure the
> animator, put the parts that you want to show or don't, and maybe
> define how you want then animated on the screen.
>   Have you ever used gato (http://gato.sourceforge.net/) ? In it you
> can only animate graph algos, but what I like in it is that it shows
> graphs in a graphical way, coloring the node that you are reading
> from, something that jeliot doesn't apear to do. OpenExVis should have
> a way for the user to make his own graphical representation of the
> info, especialy for the black boxes. Some examples would be:
> - A real semaphore for teaching about concurrency
> - Some tree representation to show search algos
> - double linked lists represented by a circle so the users see that if
> he keeps going left in it it would never end.
> 
> What do you think?
> (yep I am really ancious about this)
> 

Yes, that's something Jeliot doesn't do nor does it plan to do AFAIK.
They are very interesting goals and something I'd definitely like to see
at some point. Not until I've reached the SoC goals I've set, though.

My approach is a bit different in that I don't plan to construct a
presentation file, but instead run the code through the interpreter and
make the visualization real-time. This makes things more difficult with
non-interpreted languages, of course, but I haven't been thinking about
those very much as I see so many benefits in using interpreted ones for
educational purposes anyway.

As for implementing different visualizations, I had earlier thought
about themes that would basically be visualizing variables with
something that depicts what they represent (like showing penguin images
inside a box for representing a variable counting penguins). Your ideas
go farther and require more thought to implement.

My first thought would be that in addition to having translators be
drop-in components, the visualizers could be such as well. I do have
this feeling that the visualization area could need some major
rethinking to support this as well, though. Or maybe it would need to be
the drop-in component instead of visualizer or the visualizer and
visualization area somehow combined, or...

Currently, the visualization area is supposed to be just a fairly dumb
canvas that takes care of drawing stuff according to instructions from
the visualizer. Their tasks aren't set in stone, though, and I haven't
quite figured out where the line goes between them.

>>As for where you could help in addition to giving feedback, I would
>>really like to offload the webmaster task to someone else if you'd be
>>willing and capable of doing that. Also, when code starts to flow to the
>>CVS, I'd like to have it tested by as many people as possible.
> 
> As you probably noticed my english isn't top notch, but we can discuss
> that. I think I can do it, I just want to know exactly what you want..
> 

Well, what I would _prefer_ is a CMS of some sort that someone else
would keep running so that I can concentrate on writing content without
thinking about HTML tags, menus and such. Really, I'm not looking for
content providers as much as someone to make it easy for me to provide
the content.

>>It isn't _that_ long to the SoC deadline, so you don't need to wait very
>>long to contribute code either. I'd be glad to get some other developers
>>in the project as soon as possible :) 
> 
> Have you ever considered sending a mail to python in education? or
> maybe python-users list? I think that a lot of people would find this
> kind of program a very neat idea and would like to help out.

Well, I prefer not to keep much noise about my projects until I actually
have something for others to play with. So after there's some code, I
certainly will consider those lists as well for spreading the word.


-- 
Tero Kuusela

"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."