Hi, I'm a high school math teacher experimenting with getting kids to use SAGE. My situation - high school math in a department that rigidly believes either that
1. graphing calculators provide sufficient technology for contemporary math classrooms or that 2. technology is something secondary to the mathematics itself - it might be 'useful', but it's not what mathematics itself is about. It has been extremely frustrating trying to communicate in this environment. Ideally my vision would be to create a computational analysis kind of course where the kids would first learn how to articulate basic math concepts in pure Python. Things like the Euclidean Algorithm. Simple enough but important enough to focus on for good computational ways to think. Important - the point wouldn't be Python per se. The point would be computational thinking. How can we analyze tasks or concepts? Then show them what they have access to in SAGE. Wow. There's absolutely no rational reason at all why a course like that shouldn't be promoted. Well, anyway, at the moment I've opted for a strategy to weave SAGE into the curriculum as unobtrusively as possible. I have been successful in getting all my kids to open up SAGE notebook accounts. I've decided to weave in the use of SAGE as we work through our standard text. I'm going to use SAGE as my blackboard as often as possible, and I'm posting SAGE notebook worksheets paralleling the examples in our text for the kids to experiment with. It's a weird balance - trying to introduce using Python or SAGE to kids who have never associated that with 'math'. Funny, their attitudes actually parallel 1 and 2 above. It's such a weird culture. But other kids are seeing that, yeah, this really is pretty cool. So I hope to build momentum from that. So we are about to study interval notation. I'm going to show them how interval notation means something different in SAGE than it does in their texts. However, there's lots of ways they are related. My question - the text expects them to express things like (1, 4) intersect [2, 8] on a number line to produce the graph of [2, 4). That kind of stuff. It will also ask them to solve and graph typical linear inequalities, absolute value inequalties, etc. Is there a way to easily illustrate this in SAGE? I was contemplating discussing something like an interval testing function. But I also notice that testing something like 2.3 in [1 .. 3, step = .1] produces False. Issues like this can be a booby trap with already reluctant learners. Thanks for any advice, Michel Paul -- "Computer science is the new mathematics." -- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
