Front Burner / Back Burner

replit with Julia and OEIS number sequences

My pedagogy around teaching any computer language is to have the target language e.g. Python on the front burner but then compare and contrast with one or more back burner languages e.g. Julia, Clojure... 

Replit makes it easy to walk my talk in this respect.

I'm eager to demonstrate starting a new Jupyter Notebook and having a choice among languages. Ju for Julia, Pyt for Python, Er for R.

The focus is ball packing: triangular and square numbers (figurate on a plain (plane)); tetrahedral and cuboctahedral (= icosahedral) in space.

A student is co-developing a lexical skill (coding language) with a graphical skill (visualizing balls packing in space). 

Python replit and OEIS A005901

This way we get an algebra-geometry bridge before (independently of) a coordinate system (which comes next).

Bizmo Redesign

 

Yes, humorous.

Critical Path

We discussed this silly story: science fiction about a rogue Soviet branch of the KGB that leaked about its rogue activities to Bucky, who shared them in Critical Path, during our meetup the other day.  

Just kidding. Bucky has a similar weapon, a submarine aircraft carrier, but not quite like we see in this toy design.  Bucky is an experienced cold warrior and gives Russian intelligence a level of credibility.