Wisconsin Teaching Fellowship Project Question
I’m participating in the Wisconsin Teaching Fellows and Scholars program. This program aims to foster real scientific research on teaching and learning, an area that is typically snubbed by tenure committees at schools bigger than my own. Each fellow or scholar proposes a research question, deliberates with a team of others, spends a year studying the […]
Implicit Named Parameters?
In Learnable Programming, Bret Victor argues that to dispel the mysteries of source code we must show data in its context. One of the examples he suggests of offering context is to add a feature to IDEs: when a developer hovers over a parameter in source code, the IDE shows a message indicating the semantic […]
Madeup at the Phillips Library
Last Saturday, Madeup took its first step outside this building. The American Library Association designated this week as Teen Tech Week, and our local public library asked my department if we’d be interested in putting on a workshop for teenagers. I volunteered Madeup, despite its wobbly state. About 30 participants showed up, with half as […]
Some Starter Models
Madeup is going on the road for the first time tomorrow—at our local public library. Participants are going to create their own models and we’re going to try printing them. Since many models exhibit printing issues (too steep an overhang, intersecting geometry, non-manifoldness), we’ve generated a handful of objects that are well-behaved. Rook Hazmat X-Men […]
Madeup in a Browser
Finals week has afforded me a chance to think about something else for a while. Like getting the Madeup interpreter to run in a web browser! Thanks to the folks behind THREE.js and the Ace Editor, we’ve got a way to program and view 3-D models in a browser.
Madeup
Madeup is a language for making things up. Using commands for moving around, its speakers walk interesting paths through 3-D space and generate geometric models tracing the paths. The models may be viewed in any standard 3-D model viewer or sent to a 3-D printer. The language was designed for several reasons: To enable the creation […]
Closure Self-Reference in Madeup
Madeup is a language for expressing the construction of 3-D objects. It borrows heavily from Logo, with extra instructions for generating triangular meshes fitted around the stops the turtle makes. I’m very interested in making a RERL (the unpronounceable read-eval-render-loop) for Madeup that runs on mobile devices. Typing on mobile devices is not fun, so […]
Everywhere Pointer
My five-year-old son wanted to make an arrow. I one-upped him by making four arrows. He liked the shape and called it an “everywhere pointer.” We can make this with the following code: This code makes me realize I should try to add the unary negation operator. Right now I have to verbosely multiply by […]
Caterpillar
If we can make 2-D art out of nothing but dots on the paper, it seems we should be able to make 3-D objects out of nothing but spheres. And we now can in Madeup. I added a dot command, such that a sphere is placed at every point the programmer visits with a move command. […]
Recursive Objects
Madeup now supports recursion: Including the function definition in the environment of a closure tripped me up considerably, but I think I got it figured out. Or maybe I didn’t. The lattice was generated with this code: Cleaning up the corners is a job for another day.