Based on concepts from: Saint R. Stallman, Donald Knuth, and Alan Kay
Big Idea: Education is at the forefront of the social worries of our country and all other countries. We claim the effective math education needs to be dynamic and interactive, and the paradigms of the past are substandard for todays technology. We believe that the age of the paperless office will do much more than save trees, it will engage students, allowing them to be active participants in their own education. Re-writing the texts of the past into this interactive environment will be a large undertaking. We propose that the Open Source paradigm is the ideal paradigm to create powerful interactive text books and curriculums.
This will make computing devices all mobile devices, and the web all 1st class participants in improving the educational landscape.
The vision from Alan Kay of the Dynabook and Open Source by Richard Stallman in the early 80's can fuse together by creating an open source textbook, that also tries to address the concept of literate programming as proposed by Donald Knuth. We like the idea that the code that implements the book be as open-source as the book. A concept that Richard Stallman has certainly preached.
For this vision to happen authors need new tools that help them make interactive text books with dynamic mathematical equations, plots, multi-media and all sorts of participation by the students. This is the "Dyna" in Dynabook.
Similar concepts are being explored by UC Berkeley in the creation of the IPyNotebook. One of their laudable concepts is that a Ph.D. Thesis can and should be presented in IPython Notebook and that will be capable of include a dynamic demonstration and testable code.
Our group has prototyped a new language/system during this hackathon weekend capable of seamlessly blending together formatted markdown input (i.e. easily formatted notes, add images, html mathjax, and more) It will work on any device that supports HTML5 and Javascript. Thus by its very nature it is device independent, a modern browser is all that is needed. The simplicity of the system, allows for greater scrutiny with regards to security. Since it uses only client-side Javascript, the system is as scalable as static HTML. It is in the nature of scalability, simplicity, and ease of use that we think our approach is better. Pytnon or other languages are not required. Javascript (with many skins) has become the recognized language of choice for the web, leveraging the power of Modern Browsers.
Our very simple Open-Source Literate Dynabook is of course still just a prototype, as developed at the 2015 UCSC HACKATHON over a weekend. This and the IPython Notebook Demo are basically ilustrative and creates a seed for what open source programmer may want to use.
Such blend of open source code, literate programming, dynamic authoring, should help bring together at last the vision started long ago.
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it", A.Kay
"When Alan Kay was asked if the Dynabook has not, in fact, been realized in the form of the notebook computer, tablet, and smartphone, Kay said he believes those devices largely miss the point. Apple's iPad — and the wider computing environment, by extension — falls short of the Dynabook's ideal, Kay says, since it lacks the capacity to enable "symmetric authoring and consuming." (1)
"Kay's harsh words weren't reserved just for Apple. The computing pioneer took issue with the larger computing industry in general, in particular the ways computers are integrated into education." (1)
Alan Kay's critique is valid still today. The innovation of our project is intended to address this problem. We believe the Open Source paradigm combined with literate programming is a great way for a community to address the human challenge of teaching mathematics and other fields to a wider audience.
OPEN SOURCE: Saint Richard Stallman
The Open Source community and concept that Richard Stallman pioneered, was not developed or motivated around the idea of how to make more money, but with the idea that human beings are where they are in the evolutionary landscape because we have learnt to cooperate. So all of us as human beings need to continue to learn that sharing our work is a good thing. So making tools that allows us to share and improves our knowledge is a powerful concept.
LITERATE PROGRAMMING: Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth is known for having written the authoritative set of text books on Computer Algorithms, and is known for having written the predominant software used today by academics to help write and format text books and papers, the TeX system. He also wrote a paper called Literate Programming that espoused the concept that programs should read like books. This implies among other things the idea was that you could have code
THE DYNABOOK: Alan Kay
"Kay wanted the Dynabook concept to embody the learning theories of Jerome Bruner and some of what Seymour Papert— who had studied with developmental psychologist Jean Piaget and who was one of the inventors of the Logo programming language — was proposing."
So I will end the description of our Hackathon project with another interesting idea. If you want to innovate and you feel stuck, look to the past.
Team Members: Marcelo Siero Christopher Schuster Tommy Schmitz
Features of our software: Software is very light weight (160 lines of the main JS source code) Very scalable, no server side - interaction is necessary. Portable across platforms and devices (Uses only HTML5, Javascript, Easy formatting: Markdown + Easy Code Visibility and Invisibility.