On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 12:30 PM, Ted Kosan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> On the support list, a high school teacher (Jacob) wrote:
>
> > That would be a huge value to me. As a high school teacher, the
> > features of GeoGebra almost completely fill the void of "things I wish
> > sage could do". The notebook widgets for Mathematica style
> > demonstrations would fill quite a bit of the same void, but GeoGebra
> > is already robust and has a ton of functionality.
> >
> > I love sage, but the high school definition of "exploration" generally
> > means grabbing things and moving them around and seeing what happens.
> > That is hard to accomplish in sage and it is what interactive geometry
> > software like GeoGebra was designed to do. Sage is great for my
> > calculus and statistics classes, but it falls short in Precalculus and
> > Geometry where a much more tactile grab approach works well. If I
> > could send data freely back and forth between the two I could create
> > much more powerful concept demonstrations across the board in my
> > class.
> >
> > The fact that GeoGebra can be driven by text commands and embedded as
> > a java applet makes interfacing it with a system like sage seem
> > possible. I am very excited about this possibility because for me it
> > would "complete" sage's functionality.
>
> Jason Grout did some research on GeoGebra and found these examples:
>
> >1. Approximating an integral with sums:
> http://www.geogebra.org/en/examples/integral/loweruppersum.html
> >
> >2. Trying to intercept an object in 3d by only adjusting direction,
> >altitude, and velocity of a projectile:
>
> http://www.dean.usma.edu/math/people/Peterson/geogebra/parametric3d-ballistic.html
> >I think this helps students realize how difficult the problem is to
> do by guessing and checking!
> >
> >Lots more english examples are at
> http://www.geogebra.org/en/wiki/index.php/English
>
>
> My question is, do the core Sage developers think that adding GeoGebra
> to Sage is a good idea or a bad idea?
I think there is a brewing tension between education and
research amongst developers involved with the Sage project.
More on that in a moment.
I cannot speak for all the core Sage developers, but I think I have some
idea what some of them think and care about. My impression
is that many of them are involved in Sage because they want to create
software that they can use for attacking cutting edge research
problems in their research area. This is true of me: I started
Sage -- original called "Software for Arithmetic
Geometry Experimentation" -- to have a very powerful open software
environment for computing with modular forms, abelian varieties,
elliptic curves, and L-functions.
I am quite happy that Sage has become
much more general, addressing a huge range of mathematics, since
this expands the range of good developers and also increasing the
range of tools math researchers can bring to bare on attacking
a problem results in better research. For example, the solutions
to many problems in number theory involve
an incredible range of techniques in different areas of mathematics.
I'm fairly certain that many of the people who have put in insane
hours during the last few years making Sage what is it now (e.g.,
Mike Hansen, David Roed, Robert Bradshaw, David Harvey, Robert
Miller, Emily Kirkman, Martin Albrecht, Michael Abshoff,
etc.) have a similar perspective.
On the other hand, I teach high school students for a while every
summer (in SIMUW), as do other people like David Roe, and
of course I teach undergraduate classes... This is why I put
so much effort into co-authoring things like
the Sage notebook, which exist mainly to make the functionality of
Sage more accessible to a wider range of people.
So, I think there is a brewing tension between education and
research amongst developers involved with the Sage project
(and in my case in my own mind). Some observations:
1. The research part of the Sage project is thriving
and getting sufficient funding independent of any
connection with educational applications of Sage.
It very very healthy right now.
2. There is a lot of potential benefit to education
in having a tool like Sage, since Mathematica is
quite expensive, closed, etc. It's good for humanity
for Sage to be genuinely useful in an educational
context.
3. People working on Sage for research have
very limited time, and it can be frustrating being
regularly asked to do things by the education
community that not only have nothing to do with
research, but are even sometimes at odds with it.
4. It is vitally important for the Sage project to be both
well organized and have a clear sense of direction,
purpose and goals.
It might be a good idea if the people
who are really interested in Sage being a great
tool for *education*, would consider doing the
following:
(a) setting up a mailing list called
sage-edu
for development discussions related to
Sage in education. I realize that we
just got rid of sage-newbie, but that was for
a different reason -- because people were posting
sage-support questions there and not getting
responses.
(b) Gather together
the best education-related tools in some sort
of organized package. This could start with
Geogebra. I don't know. The key
thing is that there is no expectation at all that
the people into Sage mainly for research do
much of anything related to this project. I hope
one outcome of this project would be an spkg
that when installed would make available lots
of cool extra stuff, and of course I would be very
supportive about server space, posting of spkg's
etc. And when this gets some momentum and
quality behind it this spkg would be included
standard in Sage.
Basically I'm suggesting that everyone interested
in making Sage the ultimate educational tool
get organized, figure out who really wants to put
in an insane amount of effort on this sort of thing,
and put together a bunch of cool tools. Stop thinking
you have to convince a bunch of us research-focused
people to do the work or that your ideas are good -- you
don't -- your ideas are good; it's just that if we put a lot
of time into them we won't have time for our research.
Make an spkg that will be trivial to install into
Sage and extend its functionality. There is
definitely sufficient interest in something like this
for education, there is great potential for funding,
and potential for having a major positive impact on
society. Thus I think people will emerge who will
want to take up this challenge. I just thing it's better
if it can happen for a while unconstrained by the
rules or prejudices of the "Sage Research" side
of this project.
In summary, please put a huge amount of effort into
getting organized and putting together something polished
and great, so I can later effortless assimilate it :-).
-- William
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