GnuVision

This is my first attempt to write something for school students. The idea is to write a small book which will teach elementary programming concepts in a fun way . What age am I targetting at? Maybe, 7th standard (12 years) and above.

Plan

The book will have 3 `parts’. In part one, students will write programs to animate a cat (Neko) in its simulated world. The idea is to introduce the concept of functions, iteration etc in an interesting way.

In part 2, I will try another “game” - Conway’s famous Game-of-life. I don’t know whether this is realistic, but the idea is to show kids how to build an interesting system step-by-step. Have to think hard about how to go about doing this …

In part 3, I will try to demonstrate programs based on mathematical/logical puzzles - concepts from number theory, combinatorics, geometry etc will be used. Again, not much of an idea as to how to go about doing this …

I love reading technical books which have historical references and interesting anecdotes sprinkled all around - they tend to give a `human touch’ to the material being presented. I should see whether I can take this approach …

Philosophy

Don’t try to teach syntax-for-the-sake-of-syntax. The idea is to demonstrate how we can write programs to do fun stuff. Focus on application.

Framework for part 1

Neko is a smart little cat, and he is going to teach a bit about computer programming to school kids (and their parents)!

PyNeko is still in its infancy. Try the following at the Python prompt:

from neko import *

and you can see a window popping up:

Try the following commands:

sleep()
wakeup()
right()
left()

Now, try:

place_mouse(0, 2)
right(); right();
mouse_pos()
place_mouse(0,3)
mouse_pos()
mouse_at(0, 3)
kill_mouse()
mouse_at(0, 3)
mouse_pos()

You can place walls between cells. Here is how to do it (start with Neko at (0,0)):

right(); down()
build_wall(1,1,'up')
up()
destroy_wall(1,1,'up')
up()

Here are the most recent source files:

• neko.py
• nekobmaps.py