Once again, welcome to Creative Computing!  I’m really looking forward to another fun semester learning Python with all of you.
First of all, spend a second to create a folder for this class in your My Documents folder.  I’ll be coming by to make sure you’ve got that set up properly.
Then, spend some time answering this survey.  The first part is just background that will help me get to know you better and hopefully serve you better as an instructor.  The second part is to encourage you to get to know …

Activity 1: horizontal line
Write a function that will make your robot take a picture and display it with a horizontal line drawn across it at a height of your choice.  This should be very similar to the drawVerticalRedLine function described below.
Activity: Color follower
Write a program that will turn your robot towards objects of a particular color.  If someone is wearing a bright colored shirt, for example, make your robot turn towards it.  Another good option is to make your robot turn towards other robots by looking for blue objects.
The …

You are responsible for completing these activities in your group by Friday.  If you are done early, GREAT!  I want to see you continuing to work with the robots in cool ways.  Can you use what you know about pygame to make a neat graphical program using the robot?
Activity 0: song
Write a song function as outlined in the tutorial.
Activity 1: go function
Write a function named go that takes distance as a parameter and makes the robot go that many inches.  To do this, you will need to experiment with how …

Robots are one of those things we all think we know something about but that are surprisingly difficult to define.  Broadly, a robot is a program that runs automatically without a human needing to interfere.  Robots have logic of varying complexity that allow it to react to different situations on its own.  Given this definition, a robot doesn’t technically need to be a physical machine like the Wall-Es and Transformers found in movies.  One type of robot all of us depend on without necessarily realizing it is a webcrawler which …

PyGame is a series of Python modules specially designed to make game creation a breeze.  We’re only going to skim the surface in the next couple of weeks but I hope you will be encouraged to do some exploration on your own!  Read more about the package on its website.
We’ll start today by going through a line-by-line tutorial.  Do your best to understand what is going on and experiment as much as possible.  As you go through, think about how this compares to Turtle Graphics.  What is easier?  Harder?  More …

You should be ready to turn in three examples of object-oriented work by Wednesday.
1. Animal Class
Your animal must have at least three methods and three pieces of state.  You must have written client code that creates objects of your animal type and tests what they can do.  You will turn in both the class and your client.
2. Pyramid Seeker
See the creating turtle objects handout for requirements.
3. Turtle Inheritance
For this, you should demonstrate an understanding of creating classes that inherit behavior from Turtles.  You have three options, ordered by complexity and …

A few of you have been attempting the Star Map program.  It’s challenging, interesting and hopefully really rewarding so I strongly encourage you to do so, even if you’re not sure to finish!  My initial intent was that you would learn to use dictionaries and tuples by looking at online reference.  That turns out to be more challenging and less fun than I thought it would be, so here is some reference I think you might find useful.
Dictionaries
Dictionaries are used to map values called keys to data or values.   …

On Thursday, you started work on a project to graph baby name popularity based on Social Security Administration data.  This is a challenging project combining all you’ve learned — file reading, loops, functions, variables, type, user input… wow!  I know it’s hard but hopefully you’re seeing how all the pieces work together and feeling satisfaction at how far we’ve come along.  Being able to read in and process external data sources is both highly creative and extremely useful.  I hope you’re thinking about some of the possibilities that would be …

Quizzes looked good overall. You guys have demonstrated good understanding of basic Python constructs and I’m excited to be moving on to more advanced topics! I loved the extra credit poems — they really make grading easier. Here were some of my favorites:
Too much programming
Not seen daylight for ten days
May be addicted
Programming is like poker
when I see syntax error I fold
I add zeros to my check
like binary code
Typing in the text,
switches flip, the machine hums,
and look at what you’ve …

Programming may be the best way to learn computational thinking and gain skills transferable to many domains but the kind of programming we have been doing doesn’t capture the full breadth and excitement of computer science.  We spent the day talking about a hot area of research and development: human-computer interaction.  The goal was to expose you to some of the different kinds of challenges that software designers face and get you thinking about less well-known career opportunities.  We saw that interface designers need a broad range of skills and …