PiWords (Magic Squares in Pi)

A "PiWord" is a sort of crossword puzzle/magic square where you can find the across and down digits in the digits of Pi. Because Pi is transcendental, if you go out long enough you'll be able to find any number you like, so you can obviously create a PiWord that is as large as you …

PyCraft Alpha 1.4.0_01

I think python camp ended up being pretty educational, even if we didn't meet all of our goals. The curses version of Leo's MineCraft-In-Python (aka. PythonCraft) actually ended up pretty well, and we did some actual pretty interesting algorithm coding, and even a little computational complexity. Unfortunately, we wasted pretty much a whole day trying …

Pycraft Alpha 1.3.0

We ran out of camps this summer, so I decided to keep Leo home this week and do intensive programming "camp" (sort of like Chem Camp, but just with Leo.)  Also, I'm finally making good on my theory that kids should only be allowed to play computer games that they program themselves. The rest of …

Saint-Saens, Python*, Bach

Leo and I have started into some fairly concentrated programming practice. We've done some light programming before, but it's time to get into it for real. Because you only have a kid's attention for a few minutes at a time, you need to take maximum advantage of that obvious truism of learning: practice makes perfect ("How …

Towards a (toy) Quantum Computer

Leo's FLG (Focused Learning Goal) for this year* is to build a real quantum computing mod in MineCraft. (Note that the kids set these goals for themselves at the beginning of the year, and although I might have slightly influenced his choice of project, the "in MinceCraft" setting was all Leo!) This came from several sources, …

Raven Redux

(I actually had to look up "redux" to make sure that it wasn't a synonym of "reduce".) Anyway... So, you probably don't recall -- because I hardly did -- that about year ago Leo and I wrote a Lisp program to randomly generate "poems" by randomly selecting words from The Raven. Leo has recently been …

NP Complete 3rd Grade Math Problems

Leo's third grade class got to try a Noyce Foundation math worksheet [1] the other day. They didn't fare so well, but I gotta tell you, some of the problems are REALLY hard! In fact, one of them is NP-Hard! Now, I'm sure that there must be a trick to this problem, but I wasn't able …

8-year-old Kid v. 45-year-old Pseudo AI

I've variously been on again off again regarding computer/video games. Early on I had this fantasy concept that Leo would only be allowed to play computer games that he programmed himself, and that held for a little while, during which time we created some interesting, although laughably poor, games on the HopScotch platform. Since then …

The Young Lisper Meets Infinite Ravens

When I was a young lisper, of, say, 16 (which at the time was quite young, although these days would be considered quite old!), I read The Little Lisper (TLL). Of course, very few folks actually read TLL to learn Lisp; It's mostly a curiosity among those who already know Lisp, or at least among …

Matrix Wars (1.01)

Continuing in our exploration of gamified higher math, Leo and I programmed up a version of space invaders in HopScotch that depends on matrix multiplication. I took only a few hours to create a pretty interesting game. Below are some screenshots from the game. It's a bit hard to explain the game play; I recommend playing it yourself …