On Fri, 19 Jan 2007 12:30:45 -0800, a teacher wrote:
Dear Dr. Ryan,
I'll see if I have time to come; sounds useful. In fact, I haven't
had much time to play around with SAGE, and could use some instruction.
I am not sure I'll be using SAGE for my class; the tech people had
trouble configuring it on my new set of 30 cheapo laptops running
Windows.
But the laptops are a project in progress; maybe we can figure it out
later. (Help, anyone?)
There is a new version of SAGE I finished about a week ago that is much
better for use under Windows. To install it:
(1) download and install Cygwin from http://www.cygwin.com/
(any tech person should find this very easy)
(2) get the file here:
http://sage.math.washington.edu/SAGEbin/microsoft_windows/
and follow these directions
http://sage.math.washington.edu/SAGEbin/microsoft_windows/README.txt
Tutorials: I'm teaching a course called Technology in Math Education
through Problem Solving, at the precalculus level. While some
students are advanced math majors, others really are at the
precalculus level. So some topics of interest are:
Defining and using functions
Algebraic manipulations (simplifying, solving equations, etc.)
Number theory
Generating tables (we'll be doing this with spreadsheets; can a CAS
do this better?)
Graphing in 2 and 3 dimensions
Complex numbers and functions
Some of my students seem to be technologically savvy and gung-ho (and
others are struggling). Maybe the gung-ho ones would help with this
by figuring out how to do stuff.
Unfortunately SAGE is definitely not right now appropriate for all
parts of such a course. The main problem is "defining functions"
and "algebraic manipulation". I have a student (Bobby Moretti) who
is working very hard on adding that sort of functionality. Graphing in
2d in SAGE is excellent, as is number theory and complex numbers
and functions. Graphing in 3d is not good right now -- there is really
only one free math package that does 3d plotting at all respectively
(gnuplot), and it is released under a weird license that makes it
not appropriate for inclusion in SAGE.
The original aim of SAGE was research-level mathematics,
but we have been greatly expanding what SAGE will address,
and educational applications like yours are very high on
the list -- however we simply haven't
finished writing the relevant code to make what you need to do above
really easy and straightforward. It will happen, but it has not
happened yet.
William
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