Informal notes for introduction talk to the Getting Started wth JS-EDEN session

As presented by Meurig Beynon at the student workshop on 17th April 2016

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To be used in conjunction with the solar/control script in the project repository

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... a new kind of programming - rather different from Scratch

working with JS-Eden - tool from Warwick University in the UK

have used it with uni students and other school children in Athens

we'd like to know what you think of it 

plenty of time / work together in pairs


English word 'observe' - in Greek ...
		paratereo: to watch closely, to observe scrupulously 
		anatheoreo: to observe carefully
		(http://biblehub.com/greek/3906.htm)
	
	to observe is to see + to think
		we see many things but only pay attention to some of them 
	
	lots of observing today - you observe JS-Eden / we observe you
	
	scientists are also people who observe
	
- in our research we are really interested in using the computer to help us to observe the world

imagine you're in a spaceship [demo] - observe the sun and planets (sun yellow, earth green)

things we could observe

	how far away the spaceship is from the sun - spaceshipDistance
		can change this - move our spaceship towards / away from the sun [demo]
		
	how fast the Earth goes round the sun  - earthSpeed
		can't really change this, but can imagine what it would be like if we did [demo]
		
	how the planets move around the sun
	

What we observe depends on our point of view

	years ago, people used to think that the Sun went round the Earth
	can look at the sun and planets in motion and see why they thought this
	
	planets were special because they didn't move in the same regular pattern
	- in fact the planets didn't always seem to move in one direction but sometimes moved forwards and backwards in the sky
	[the word 'planet' comes from the ancient Greek 'wandering star': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet]
	
	Can understand that by looking directly at earth from our spaceship [demo]
	- when we do this the sun is seen to move in a circle around the earth, but the planets move in 'epicycles'

	Something you can find out by experiment - and that I discovered without realising whilst demo-ing this live!
	- is that some epicycles may only be observed when the speed of the earth is normal