RE: make-a-face projects

["Wendy Petti" <wpetti@xxxx>]

Thanks for sharing your make-a-face/make-a-baby project, Gary. It gives me
some new ideas to think about. I hope some of the other members of
MWcybercourse will weigh in with their thoughts for adapting/extending the
project.

We have a "make a face" folder at MicroWorlds in Action, but we only have
two projects in it so far. (I've been working on 2 more projects which
involve animated faces but haven't finished the extra graphics yet.)
Anyhow, you might like to take a peek at our partial folder... feel free to
use or adapt any of the shapes if you download the projects, or you can
follow the "Shapes" link from the bottom of the overview page and then save
any facial features you like. Our folder uses a different turtle for each
body part and then the procedures instruct each turtle to choose at random
from a list of shape names and put on that shape.

I think it would be interesting as a next step to write a procedure which
creates a random woman and a random man (many of our shapes are unisex but
some are clearly male or female.)... and then another procedure would choose
at random from among their two sets of features to create their child (which
would be a bit smaller). All three faces would be displayed on the same
page. I envision the child with a thought bubble over its head saying,
"I've got Mom's hair and nose, and Dad's skin and eyes and mouth" (or
whatever).

Our make-a-face folder is at
http://www.openworldlearning.org/owlb/make_a_face/make_a_face.htm

Wendy Petti


-----Original Message-----
From: Gary McCallister [mailto:mccallis@xxxx]
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2001 4:59 PM
To: MWcybercourse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Next Lesson


I finally had a little time to examine the many modifications to my
mosquito program earlier. I learned so much from that experience I thought
I would throw out another little project to see how different minds handle
it. The attached program allows one to:
1. First, draw two faces with variables for shape of: face, eyes, nose and
mouth. I used the simplest figures I could come up with quickly since my
interest is not on the appearance, but the sets of instructions.
2. Then you can have the two get married and have babies. The offspring
will have characteristics picked from the instruction sets of each parent
for the same set of varibales.
The idea is that DNA is a set of instructions, and when sexual
reproduction occurs those instructions are called pretty randomly. Most
people think instructions must be called sequentially, but in DNA that is
not always the case.
The program could obviously be improved in several ways, such as using
more realistic shapes; perhaps elipses of different parameters for face, eye
and nose shapes. I think it would also be fun to create a catalog of faces
that would allow the observer (experimenter) to arrange different kinds of
marriages and observe the offspring. It would also be valuable to a
biologist to be able to keep track of the varios offspring in some way so we
could test the mendelian assortment taking place. Anyway, what do you all
suggest?



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