[swift-users] Prototyping what Swift can look like in educational settings

[Donald Pinckney]

Hi Erica, and others with feedback,

Thanks for your positive feedback about my playground.  Top of my list for critical features would be what Loïc mentioned, some mathematical notation support inside the playground markdown.  Currently I embedded PDFs which I rendered using LaTeX, but it would be amazing to perhaps have native LaTeX support in playgrounds.

Erica, 
I really like all your suggestions, and I can certainly feel how they could contribute to creating very interactive learning resources.  I'm not quite understanding the 3rd bullet, but I'm sure it's just as great of a suggestion as the others ;).

Donald Pinckney

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jan 6, 2016, at 10:48 AM, Erica Sadun <erica at ericasadun.com> wrote:
> 
> Don,
> 
> I love your playground. This highlights a few areas where I really would love to see some enhancements from the playground team. Here are a few off the top of my head. My actual list is longer:
> 
> * Your students should be able to have an appropriate input and submission component that isn't compiled -- answering in freeform language to the questions.
> * Playgrounds need a "reset" button that enable any tweaks to return to a pristine state for starting over.
> * Playgrounds should offer a "compute this outside" option, that allows you to add code *inside* the pages but have them computed outside. For example in your playground there's the harmonic oscillator, and a few other number-crunchy stop points.
> * Playgrounds should be able to integrate video and audio snippets so it's not just all text text text for lessons
> * Playgrounds need support for grammar / spelling tests and writing tools.
> * Playgrounds should also include annotation tools (highlighting, notes) similar to what we see in iBooks as well as snippets/note support for collecting items (both text and code) between lessons
> 
> I could go on but I think you get the idea of how great it is to see this kind of development and how far it could be pushed for even better teaching/learning experiences.
> 
> -- Erica
> p.s. I have a book on playgrounds in iBooks, if you want to ping me off-list, I'll send you a promo code
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 6, 2016, at 11:32 AM, Tom Sheffler via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Thanks for sharing this playground!  I hadn’t seen anything quite like it, and it’s illuminating some of the possibilities.
>> 
>>> On Jan 5, 2016, at 10:42 PM, Donald Pinckney via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi all,
>>> Personally, I love Swift, and I am curious to see if it will be used in educational settings, not necessarily even CS education.  As something of an experiment to see how Swift could currently look in education, I coded a Swift playground (sorry, very Mac specific right now!) that is a rewriting of a lab activity we did in my 3rd quarter of physics.  For those who are interested in educational aspects of Swift, and have a Mac to run this code, feel free to check out my attached playground, and give any sort of feedback, with respect to either the code or more philosophically where you think Swift could go with education.
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> Donald Pinckney
>>> 
>>> <Schrödinger.playground>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> swift-users mailing list
>>> swift-users at swift.org
>>> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-users
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> swift-users mailing list
>> swift-users at swift.org
>> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-users
>