On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 5:53 AM, kcrisman <[email protected]> wrote:
One idea you may want to consider is using Sage strictly *without* any > programming per se > Something that occurred as kind of a surprise - an example problem in our text involved the income figures for Oprah, Seinfeld, and Simon Cowell. Given relations between their incomes, you have to find the specific values. Kind of a silly, typical, schoolish text book problem. So I entered the following in SAGE: Cowell = x > Seinfeld = Cowell + 15 > Oprah = Cowell + 215 > > Oprah + Seinfeld + Cowell == 365 > (figures represent millions) When you evaluate this, SAGE produces the more typical algebra equation: > 3x+230=365 > > The kids could really appreciate that. It made total sense to them what was going on. It was a pleasant surprise for me, as I hadn't intended for that to be the point, but of course!, you can organize the information from a word problem in this kind of intuitive pseudo-codish way, and SAGE will translate your expressions into standard algebra. So that was fun. - Michel -- "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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
