During the first semester I focused mainly on programming in Python
and using it for sequences, series,
combinatorics, Boolean stuff, different base systems, and so on. I
of course used the Litvins' Digital Age
for a lot of this. Second semester I plan to use Sage more as the
primary tool and will get into trig and
conics and other typical mathy things.
Hey Michel, its good to know that I'm not the only one down here in the trenches trying to do some Discrete Math in HS using a computational approach!
I have these kids for 2 semesters. The first semester is called Computer Math which, believe it or not, is a course I introduced in the 80s using IBM BASICA that covered similar material as you did with the Litvin text. I used the Litvin text in Computer Math with SAGE all that first semester this year. However, my crew was not as adept as yours sounds! So, we only covered the first 6 chapters. Now, I have the cream of 2 sections of Computer Math in the second semester (we call it Advanced Computer Math). I will start to jump around a bit to cover some of the more interesting topics in the time remaining. The kids love using SAGE too.
Funny you should be using preCalc texts in your class as well. The texts titled "Analysis" probably are preCalc texts too. In HS "Analysis" is usually short for "Analysis of Functions" or "Functional Analysis" which is really the meat of preCalc. I don't think the authors of those books were talking about Real Analysis.
Also, we just finished a unit of conics in my preCalc class. We did everything the traditional way as well as using Graphing Calculators. Then, when I went over a quiz they just took, I thought I'd show them how its done in SAGE. These students almost fell out of their chairs!
HTH, A. Jorge Garcia Applied Math and CompSci http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com http://www.youtube.com/calcpage2009 _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
