Interesting feedbacks for SAGE,maths,teaching,using VM... but I have a question :
when you go teaching in far away places, why you don't go with a small equipement for a local area network (switch, Ethernet wires) ? because after installing the network, you can use your computer (for example Ubuntu OS) with a sage cloud, and all students only need an internet browser no need Internet, no need VM, ... If no need for sharing files, you have USB live SAGE too.... PS: at my job, I was told that VM working better on same native OS, On Friday, 17 July 2015 20:00:49 UTC+2, Viviane Pons wrote: > > 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.
