[Events] Next steps for "Boston Python workshops" (fwd)

[Jessica McKellar]

Hi all,

> Next steps
> ----------
>
> * Jessica emails us about the visual programming thing she thought might
be cool.

I had suggested turning this light wall visualizer project I'm involved with
into a project for the Boston Python workshop. I've put a super-minimal
implementation at https://github.com/jesstess/ColorWall (see the README for
a description, dependencies, and usage). There's an old demo video from the
original light wall project at http://vimeo.com/16522975.

In a nutshell, what this project provides is a framework for writing color
patterns for a pixel wall. A basic wall has been written, so you can jump
right in and write effects. I've put up a few basic effects that illustrate
some principles about inheritance, the random and time modules, and HSV
colors in Python that might be useful to attendees.

Some pros for using this as one of the projects for the workshop:

1. Easy to get something concrete done during the workshop that you can show
off to friends. A couple of hours is enough time to write  several effects,
even if you're new to Python.

2. Minimal dependencies: only Tkinter, which as far as I can tell ships with
all Pythons past 2.3 on all OSes.

3. Scales to all skill levels. People new to Python can stick with basic
color Effects. More experienced people could be adding sound,
keyboard/mouse/touchpad sensitivity, clickable walls, etc.

4. Sharing is easy: people can share effects, we could put them all up on
github, we could do a big class demo of all the effects at the end, etc.

As I mentioned, what's on github is minimal -- if we end up using this
project I'd flesh out the documentation, add some more examples (there are a
ton at https://github.com/jesstess/allegro if you want to see more), take
some nice screencaps for advertising, etc.

-Jessica
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