Friday, December 11, 2015

Extended Safari

STEM Class 2015

I'm grateful for the extension on Safari On-Line, which I'm showing off to my students on a shared-screen (my screen) using "Internet radio" an audio format that includes the "call in" feature, i.e. any of my students might get the talking stick and address the group.

As it turned out, after passing the stick around (metaphorically) in the early sessions, we settle on using the message board (chat box) and just let me do the talking, answering what came up in chat (both public and private channels, like IRC).

Fluent Python

We had ten sessions in all, four hours each, with labs, so I figure the equivalent of a college course in terms of lectures, but then I was not on the hook to evaluate student work, which has been the focus at OST.

I showed them recent reading:  O'Reilly books on SQLite, Flask and Luciano Ramalho's Fluent Python, all apropos because the coded example in front of us was using all three.  I'm letting them look at a prototype / experimental Flask application by the clerk of IT @ NPYM.

SQLite is award-winning, and free (both as in beer, and as in freedom), with sqlite3 a module in Python's library.  Import it, and you're set to prototype / develop.

Flask gives you a toy web server, facing yourself on localhost, again for web development purposes. The goal is to emulate a standard LAMP stack.

Speaking of LAMP, my course also featured MAMP Pro, for which I forked out $59 this afternoon, deciding its well worth the investment.  That gives me a MySQL ready to connect through localhost, and an Apache ready to serve the same way.

Some of my students were eager for more and vocal about it.  I've been offered another gig.  I'm not at liberty to steer them into OST however, given the impending closure.  However I'll be able to keep Safari On-Line, a benefit offered to former OSTies.

I've abstracted some of the best of OST and mashed it up with other learning to create OCT storyboards, OCT being a hypothetical school modeled in various prototypes.