Dear all, this last week, I was giving a class in a summer school in Uganda, along with Jennifer Balakrishnan, on experimental mathematics (mine was combinatorics and Jennifer's was number theory). Both classes were based on Sage. Let me give you a feedback on using Sage here.
Conditions; - around 30 students - limited Internet: the university network was much too slow for us to work with, we were given a special network bought for the school but the data was limited (we had to buy extra data a few times during the week) - every student had his / her own laptop. Only PCs, most of them Windows, 2 or 3 linux (Ubuntu) - most students had very limited computer skills Because of the Internet limitation, SMC was no good solution for everyone to use. We still used it to do some demos, share code, and also as a backup options for the students who couldn't get Sage running. Sage installation: Most of the students didn't have Sage installed, so the first afternoon was devoted to install Sage everywhere. It mostly worked but we sometimes had issues: * hard drive limitations: some hard drive were completely full and VM + Sage was too big to get installed (also their HD was often partitioned in weird ways and the program partition was full) * for some reason, the Sage VM takes forever to load on Windows 8 (which makes it seem broken) Using Sage on the VM: Never had so much Sage on Windows experience before, this was a good test and now here's everything that was wrong and annoying: * Once a Sage virtual machine was in "saved" mode, it would usually crash on re-openning and we had to discard the saved mode (I guess because their computers were running out of memory) * Sharing files between the VM and Windows was NOT straightforward at all, the Sage explanation were not working (I think you need to change the usergroup in Ubuntu or something like this), at the end I just dropped the idea as I could not do it on all 30 machines at once * And I didn't manage to make them download any notebooks either, because the notebook wouldn't take https addresses, so actually I had no way to share notebooks with them!! (except on SMC) * pdflatex wasn't installed by default which for me was a real problem as I use it a lot to print combinatorial objects (thank you Jean-Baptiste for the ascii art on binary trees, it saved me a bit!). And because of internet limitations and the lack of Ubuntu knowledge from my students, it was not really possible to install it on all their machines (I mean the VM) * I couldn't get the VM to show multiple windows and not even multiple tabs. This was so annoying... Sometimes a student would click on a link on a notebook and there was no way of going back to where it was before... Or to open Internet on the VM to download the notebooks or something... To finish, one very good thing that we need to keep: the Help link on the notebook was great, the students were navigating on the different tutorials and this worked very well. Anyway, this list is here to remind us what we could do better. I don't mean to push anybody but now that we'll have full time developers, I figured this real life experience was very useful for us non-Windows-users to have (at the end, what's the point of having open source softwares if the people who really need it can't use it properly?) Also I want to say that despite all of this, the school went really well. The students were really happy to learn about Sage, they were the most enthusiastic and motivated students I ever had. Both Jennifer and I were able to do great mathematics and we had a wonderful time! If ever you're interested, my class material on combinatorics is here: https://www.lri.fr/~pons/en/eaump.php and the whole summer school material (including the previous week) is there: http://people.bath.ac.uk/masgks/EAUMP/ Best, Viviane -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
