Madeup Status Report #3
These past two weeks were host to a considerable number of bug fixes and model generation tweaks. Dowels can be rounded and their thickness can be changed. Better geometry is generated for surfaces of revolution and extrusion. And the user interface feels much more coherent and better remembers users’ settings. Read below for a daily breakdown […]
Madeup Status Report #2
Madeup saw a major behind-the-scenes shift this fortnight: I switched to a handwritten lexer and parser! I can honestly say my life has improved significantly since the change. Parser generators are great, but I’m not sure decoupling a grammar specification from the code that recognizes utterances conforming to that grammar is really what we want to […]
Madeup Status Report #1
The reason I became a teacher is so that I can do 1000 things in a day. I design homeworks; write grading unit tests; plan and deliver lectures; read up on relevant news and research; review academic papers; read books on things I don’t know enough about; compose haiku; serve on various university committees; oversee independent studies; meet […]
Madeup Briefing
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Introduction Madeup is a language for making things up–literally. It is a platform for thinking about shapes in an imperative, algorithmic way. Its speakers trace out an object’s skeleton or cross section and then use a Madeup command to generate a solid 3D model that can be printed on a 3D printer. Here we briefly describe the language […]
Blocks as a Gateway
Since starting work on Madeup, I’ve been trying to read everything I can on procedural design. My most recent discovery is John Maeda’s Design by Numbers. The author makes it his mission to teach programming principles by drawing on a 100×100-pixel canvas with a very simple language called DBN. In chapter 6 of his book, which discusses […]
Madeup Circulating
Last week I started a Kickstarter campaign to support summer development for Madeup. The support I’ve found amongst my former students and coworkers has been very encouraging. I’m not surprised, however, because they are good people. What’s been more surprising is the support of random strangers. A Google search of madeup kickstarter reveals the following: […]
The Shallow End of Languages
Learning a foreign language for the first time? Start with Esperanto: The results of these studies … demonstrated that studying Esperanto before another foreign language expedites the acquisition of the other, natural, language. This appears to be because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one’s first foreign language, whereas the use of a grammatically simple […]
Fall 2014 Commit Logs
This past fall, I taught an introductory programming class in which students managed their code with Bitbucket. I had decided the problems I was sure to encounter foisting version control on first-semester students were not worse than the problems I was sure to encounter by asking them to manage their own local workspaces and submit via clunky submission systems, and the eventual payoffs […]
Bruner on the Power of Writing and Mathematics
I’d seen Jerome Bruner’s Towards a Theory of Instruction recommended somewhere, and my library had a well-worn copy of just waiting to be read. Bruner himself is apparently also well-worn. He was born in 1915—and is apparently still teaching! Much of what Bruner has to say revolves around active learning. Probably this book was more revolutionary for its […]
Limiting Execution Time in a Shell, Part II
A year ago, I thought I worked around the halting problem. I have students’ code that I need to grade, but sometimes they slip in an infinite loop. This really messes up automated grading. I wrote a shell script that would run their code for X seconds, killing their process if necessary. Sadly, I went to […]