1.25.1 ⌚️ 3D Modeling, Snoopy Watch Faces, Hello World, Regular Expressions

Welcome and thank you for reading today. This email has links about Snoopy, finding Elvis with regular expressions, getting started with Sketchup and 3D modeling software, and a really great STEAM magazine geared towards teachers. It's called Hello World. I hope a few of these links will interest you.

SketchUp and 3D Modeling Projects

In my experience writing and publishing articles about kids and computer the past 11 years, not all kids are into coding. Some like to take things apart. Others get into robots. Still others are interested in the ideas and maybe math behind computing. Or they only want to learn enough software to create fashion projects. Or pursue other careers.

3D modeling software is a great place to start for kids who like to work with their hands. And take things apart. Everything happens on the computer screen. And it’s possible to output work as 3D models if that’s wanted.

There’s at least two big 3D modeling software tools to consider, Blender which is free open source and SketchUp which has a free version. Learning either tool (or both) will translate well to learning other 3D modeling tools. There’s tools like TinkerCAD and Maya, but only TinkerCAD seems kid-friendly if you start from scratch. However, TinkerCAD is a web application. Not something that you download. That may be ideal or not, depending on your situation.

SketchUp is the most product oriented, with a version for schools and a huge set of video tutorials on YouTube. However, Blender appears to work great once you learn the basics with a tool like SketchUp (or TinkerCAD). Here’s a bunch of links to get started. In the next month or so of Wednesday email newsletters, I plan to feature 2-3 projects with SketchUp.

SketchUp
http://www.sketchup.com/
http://www.sketchup.com/learn
http://help.sketchup.com/en/article/95079
http://extensions.sketchup.com/
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query="sketchup+tutorial"
http://vimeo.com/search?q="sketchup+tutorial"

SketchUp for Education K-12
http://www.sketchup.com/3Dfor/k12-education
https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com/

SketchUp Video on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/SketchUpVideo

Download Sketchup
http://www.sketchup.com/download

Blender
https://www.blender.org/
https://www.blender.org/download/
https://www.blender.org/support/tutorials/
https://www.blender.org/support/

TinkerCAD
https://www.tinkercad.com/
https://www.tinkercad.com/classrooms-resources
https://www.tinkercad.com/projects

Snoopy on Your Watch

Earlier this year, I finally got around to buying an Apple watch. Less for timekeeping and more for tracking sleep. But the Snoopy watch face turned out to be the most interesting part of using the watch. Yes, he's cute. Woodstock too. However, the Snoopy watch face showed me a key difference between watches. Most mechanical and digital watches have a single watch face. If you want lots of data, it's jammed into a small space. The Apple watch takes a different approach. You customize the watch face. And you can have many different watch faces.

For example, when I'm bored, I'll switch to the Snoopy watch face. Then flick my wrist over and over to see what Snoopy and Woodstock do. When I go for long walks, I switch to a watch face that I customized to display fitness data. Most of the time, I use a watch face that includes weather and other information. Right now, though, I have a traditional watch face with hands for minutes and hours. I also added a small circle with a map of the solar system showing the location of planets over days and weeks. Because I can and that interests me. :-)

This ability to have a watch match what I'm doing never occurred to me. It's a subtle but powerful idea. I had thought of the Snoopy and other character watch faces only as a fun gimmick. In fact, it shows how humdrum technology like a watch can support everyday human activity.

How Apple made the ultimate Snoopy watch: “You wouldn't believe the minutiae”
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/snoopy-apple-watch-face

Getting Snoopy on Apple Watch was more challenging than you'd think
https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/09/19/how-snoopy-made-it-onto-the-apple-watch

Introducing watchOS 10, a milestone update for Apple Watch
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/06/introducing-watchos-10-a-milestone-update-for-apple-watch/

This Snoopy Apple Watch face is too cute — here’s how to get it
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/snoopy-apple-watch-face-too-cute-hands-on-photos-how-to-get/

Hello World Magazine

If you don't know, Hello Magazine is a quarterly periodical published by the Raspberry Pi organization in the UK. They have a print and digital PDF version. All their content is STEM/STEAM teacher oriented. Subscriptions are free. They also encourage teachers to submit articles. Scroll down their one page website and you'll see a couple big books they've published which also might interest teachers. Plus a podcast and blog. While published in the UK, the content has value anywhere computer science and technology are taught. Plus they make an effort to cover how STEM/STEAM are taught around the world in different cultures.

Hello World
https://www.raspberrypi.org/hello-world

Elements of Coding: Regular Expressions

This is the sixth in a series about common elements across programming languages. Once you learn one language, identifying these elements is a way to learn new languages quickly. Plus, you'll get a deeper understanding about the problems languages have to solve. And the trade offs languages make.

Last week explored the way programming languages control their processing flow of statements, instructions, and function calls. This week is about how languages use regular expressions to validate user inputs.

In software programming, you might have a large chunk of data to work through, pulling out names and discarding other data. Regular expressions are one way to carefully go through data, character by character, to find data that matches what you want to find.

Regular expressions are a set of characters, numbers, and punctuation in a predefined order. They can be used to create a pattern your programming language uses to find matches. Every programming language has variations in how they interpret regular expressions. For people who like puzzles, creating regular expressions is an extremely fun challenge. It’s like cracking a cryptographic code.

Imagine this chunk of nonsense text:

LoremipsumdolorsitametconsecteturadipiscingelitEtiamnisivelitfringillaquisquamaeleifendaccumsanquamNunchendreritquamaloremimperdietneciaculisleoscelerisqueUttellusenimfringillaquisfringillaatvenenatisvellacusInseddignissimrisusCurabitelvisualivervulputatearcuetmetushendreritposuereMauristempusnonlacusatullamcorperFuscelacusnequescelerisquesedsagittisacblanditsedfelisSuspendissemaurislacusconsectetureumassaaportaaccumsanrisusDuisfeugiatintortorfeugiatimperdietNuncjustonisicondimentumegetnullainluctussempelvisraliveurnaVestibulumegetgravidanislvitaelaoreetfelisProinconsequatsemperipsumetelementumeratfringillaaDonecetlaoreetlacusCurabiturluctusatliberoeuvehiculaMaurisinnelvisquejustoVestibulumultricesmiatinterdumfringillaAliquameratvolutpatProinnecelementumrisusconsecteturadipiscingmassaPhasellusacmassalectusDonecquammassaportaidleositametullamcorperlobortisenimQuisquevitaenisitemportristiquelectusvitaetempornibh

How would you find Elvis in this mess? And is he alive?

According to one online regular expression editor (see links below), the expression /elvis/ run against this chunk of text will find three instances of Elvis spelled in lower case letters.

However, in the .Net programming language, the regular expression is \belvisb\. Notice the differences?

In one language the slashes (also called delimiters) lean forward while in .Net the slashes lean backwards (maybe because Windows uses backslashes, for example, for file folder path names). And .Net requires \b where the other language uses a single forward slash.

What do the slashes and b mean to a programming language processing this nonsense text? The slashes mark the start (open) and end (close) of the regular expression pattern. In the .Net programming language, the b tells the language where to begin and end with the search phrase.

In the nonsense text example, there are two instances of the word elvis followed by a single character followed by the word alive. We can find the phrase elvis alive by adapting our regular expression to /elvis.alive/. In the .Net programming language, the expression to use is \belvisb.*baliveb\. The single period or .* (period asterisk) tells the programming language the word elvis and the word alive are separated by any character except a newline. If you don't know, a newline is a special character used to mark the end of one line of data and the start of a new line of data.

There are more useful and serious reasons to use regular expressions beyond finding Elvis. For example, regular expressions are used to confirm a phone number is in the correct format and does not contain non-numbers. You and I know the phone number ABC-DEF-GHIJ is not a phone number but programming languages must be told US phone numbers are a collection of numbers, starting with two groups of three numbers followed by a group of four numbers.

Zip or postal codes are another common use for regular expressions. Another use is search and replace, for example, to use patterns to search online comments to find URLs, swear words, or other data then remove them.

The links below give you an idea of how a few languages use regular expressions. When you learn a new language, and need to use regular expressions, pay attention to how the new language differs in its implementation of regular expressions.

Regular Expressions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
http://www.regular-expressions.info/tutorial.html
http://www.regular-expressions.info/examples.html

Online Regular Expression Editor
http://www.regexr.com/

Examples of Regular Expressions in Perl
http://affy.blogspot.com/p5be/ch10.htm

Examples of Regular Expressions in Go
https://gobyexample.com/regular-expressions

Examples of Regular Expressions in JavaScript
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions

Examples of Regular Expressions in .Net
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/9099/The-Minute-Regex-Tutorial
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg440701.aspx

Examples of Regular Expressions in Java
http://www.vogella.com/tutorials/JavaRegularExpressions/article.html

This Week

My Sunday email this week has fun often offbeat links about what makes bears so cute and cuddly when, in reality, they would eat us for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Also, fairy tales could be older than we expect, millennia old not centuries old. Wondering what it might be like to fall into a black hole? There's a link for you to find out. Plus more STEM/STEAM links. Look for the email this Sunday.