HackProp 2: Paint Partners

Hack Prop Title: Paint Partners

Description:

A collaborative drawing tool made in Python using PyGame as the GUI, and homemade networking code borrowed from Hack1. Ideally would be able to be used as a teaching tool, by limiting the teacher to be the only one able to draw.

Libraries:

The only library we need to be using is PyGame.

Upstream Repository:

pypi.python.org

Hardware:

The only hardware we need is the Raspberry Pi, Display, Input Devices

Team:

I will be working with mstubinis for the project

Project Milestones:

1. Develop non-server side code to modify and display an image, load config data, and prepare text fields
2. Develop server side and networking code to send and process information: pixel data, chat messages, client connecting and disconnecting from server, admin issuing commands through console
3. Finish development tasks, build documentation, distribute upstream.

License:

GNU GPL2.0

Upstream Mentor:

Currently none, but the project isn't really different from our last one in terms of what needs to be done.

Final Thoughts:

This project should be an interesting build off of the work that was done on Hack 1 and should serve as a cool project providing a service.

Adventures in being a Teaching Assistant

This is probably the first in a short series on my perception on being a Teaching assistant. Hopefully this will be a good place to give my thoughts for a few different thoughts I have from being on both sides of taking a class.

I am a teaching assistant for an intro level programming course at RIT. I have been one for almost a year now and I have become accustomed to the way the teacher I help teaches, the kinds of questions the people come up with, and certain pitfalls from of early level programming. That said, the most difficult thing is remembering what a person should be expected to know and what they probably don't know yet. For example, I had a student ask me a question, which I had to stop and think of the answer for a minute or two, because my normal go to method hadn't been covered by the course. I feel like that is probably the biggest issue in teaching in general, and one of the biggest to overcome in becoming a good teacher.

Another interesting thing is seeing the difference in proficiency that you run into across multiple people doing the same thing. I have a few students that I never need to say anything to because they already either know everything or just catch on quickly enough that they don't need help. On the other hand, there are students who don't quite seem to understand anything that the professor just went over and ask questions about everything. Of course there are also plenty that fall in between.

I think the biggest thing I have noticed is the different ways that students attend class. What I am meaning is, how are they handling class time. I can see in every student is different ways that I have been a part of class at one point or another. It really is eye-opening seeing yourself in the people you are working with and realizing that you were there at one point. Overall, I am enjoying my time and I have several students that are fun to interact with from day to day. I hope this continues for a while more.

Tic-Tac-Pi - Final Thoughts

This was the second project that myself and mstubinis did for the ADVFoss class. This one was overall a much simpler project, mostly because it was doing something that we both thought would be fairly simple from the get go. I personally didn't have an overwhelming amount to do since mstubinis took charge right away and knocked out the game code itself in fairly short order. That left me pretty exclusively in charge of getting everything packaged. I originally had the same issues that I did in when it came to packaging up PyTalk, but more on that in a minute.

What I'm most surprised by was the expediency with which mstubinis actually got everything together. He had me write some very simple resolution code and had me do the testing to make sure it was working, but otherwise, he pushed out everything else in the time between classes in the first week. After that, it was fairly slow until we had to package it up because we had already had everything finished.

For some reason, my laptop finds it impossible to build python eggs. This happens to be a fairly large problem when trying to push things up to PyPi. Naturally this means I needed to go elsewhere for my uploading needs, which the first instinct is to go to a lab machine. Problem is that the lab machines are fairly finicky when it comes to actually using python on them. I finally managed to find a work around using my roommates laptop because he has a linix partition on his drive. After moving over the files, the upload and registration was extremely quick.

Overall, I found this project to be a little lackluster since I personally didn't have a lot to do for the project and I hope that changes as we move forward into the third hack for the class.