michel paul wrote:
Recently I've found Sage <http://sagemath.org> invaluable for the
purpose of getting computational thinking into the math curriculum.
I've spent the last year figuring out how to harness Sage in class,
and it is paying off. The difficulty with a pure Python approach has
been that it seems so foreign to everyone from kids through
administrators, it doesn't look like anything that gets tested on
state standards, and it seems like 'hard work' when we already have
these nifty hand-helds that graph any function you want. However, the
power of Sage blows any graphing calculator, even the new Inspires,
out of the water. Simultaneously, you can program in pure bare-bones
Python within Sage. So I have found it invaluable to capitalize on
the power of Sage to serve as a way to introduce into math classes the
value of the ability to think in pure Python.
Nice graphics is definitely a key requirement for any tool I would
consider in an introductory course.
I'm not familiar with Sage, but I wonder if adding a few packages to
"pure Python" would do the same. I'm looking now at NumPy and
MatPlotLib in a proposal for "Introduction to Scientific Computing",
currently taught using C with some addons for plotting. The class is a
joint effort between our Astronomy and Physics departments.
The advantage of Python/Numpy/MatPlotLib is that what students learn of
Python will be useful beyond just math and science. I think of Sage as
just a replacement for MatLab, not something I would use in programming
my mail server.
Anyone with experience using these tools?
-- Dave
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