What’s this math teacher going to do to keep busy during summer break? Get back to my coding roots! That’s what!

What?

Over the course of the summer I’m going to experiment with writing music using Python and broadcast the whole adventure live on Twitch!

When?

In the “evenings”, starting around 7pm EDT.  As often as I’m able to. Follow me on Twitch for notifications or watch for updates on Twitter.  If you miss out on the live coding, don’t worry!  I’ll also be editing and uploading “abridged” versions to YouTube.

Why?

Because I think it will be fun!  And there’s math!  It’s fun with math!

As a teacher, I want get better at encouraging students to “play with math”.  However, over the course of the school year I’ve spent so much time trying to prepare students for SOL tests that I’ve forgotten what that looks like.   The only solution I could think of is for me to “play with math” again, and this is my way of doing that.

But why Python?

Several reasons actually.  First, it’s relatively easy to read.  Second, it’s been growing in popularity as a platform for scientific computing.   Third, I’m terrible at it.

Yes. That’s right.  I’m terrible at it.

I’m not exactly a Python “noob”, but it’s been about a decade since I’ve used it for anything and that was relatively simple scripting.  That’s part of the adventure here!   I’m going to make mistakes, spend hours debugging, and be knee deep in technical documentation.  Furthermore, every stupid mistake is going to be broadcast live on the Internet.  But you know what?  I’m okay with that.  It’s part of the learning process and unavoidable when “playing with math”.

How?

You want to follow along and experiment on your own?  Great!

I’m using Anaconda to manage my Python installation.   In addition to that, I also installed the sounddevice library by using the pip command from an Anaconda shell. Everything after that is all done live!  After each live code sessions, an updated source code file will be posted on GitHub.

Video Archive

After each session, I’ve been going back through the recording and editing to speed up through the boring parts.  The resulting “timelapse” videos are being posted to my YouTube channel.