On Mar 13, 3:44 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: > Anyone familiar with Jerry Uhl's "Calculus & Mathematica" method of > teaching???
I took several courses from Jerry Uhl in the late 70's, early 80's, and it was a great experience. The essay at the link is classic JJ. In 1992 I taught integral calculus to a small group of first-term freshman using the Calculus & Mathematica materials. We met one day a week in a classroom and then three days a week in a lab setting. I had an undergraduate TA to help with lab sessions. I chose to do a lot of grading of the electronically submitted worksheets. Here's another +1 for TinyMCE - the ability to insert legible comments in student work to be returned to the students. I thought it was a good experience for the students. It gave them competency in different ways than a traditional class. I wouldn't say they learned *more*, but they became adapt at certain things (such as visualizing global/local behavior of functions, applications of definite integrals, convergence of power series) while not reinforcing other skills (algebraic manipulation, techniques of integration, calculation). Folks on this list would probably say that was an improvement. The course was an experiment and in a small department we didn't have the luxury of continuing to run it in parallel with our regular courses, and there wasn't sufficient enthusiasm to cutover to this style en masse. However, I continue to borrow ideas to use in my own courses from this experience. Which explains *some* of my enthusiasm for Sage. For example, I may try to do a better job of motivating series in a weeks' time by first "playing around" in Sage with some power series obtained by any tricks possible (algebra, polynomial division) other than the traditional Taylor polynomial via derivatives. I'm hoping it will motivate students to ask about questions of convergence/divergence *before* being told about it. I'll probably post separately about this in the next couple of days. Rob --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
