Hi, Being this a list on Sage and education I will keep the discussion here because ideas on interface could be useful for sage in particular and for education problems and CAS in general. If it becomes too much general or Sage unrelated and this is not the place for it, please tell me.
Ted Kosan escribió: [...] > My opinion on the text-oriented interface vs. a calculation-oriented > interface issue is that a student needs to learn how to program first > before using a calculation-oriented interface. One reason for this is > that after one knows how to program, learning mathematics is > significantly easier. Is an interesting alternative approach.There is a deeper argumentation of this? My undergraduate studies were in Informática Matemática (informatics and mathematics some kind of middle place between both) and in fact I remember how much insight I gain from learning math at the same time that I was learning programming, data bases and so on, but I never thought the other way around and this is an approach I will like to explore. In fact, in the documentation, you mention the blog post that I have read, but if you have any deeper info I would like to read it also. > Another reason is that it is fairly easy for a > student who knows how to program a CAS to learn how to use a > calculation-oriented interface to it. However, I have found that > knowing how to use a calculation-oriented interface does not prepare a > student at all for learning how to program. > Yes that's my experience also. Calculation-oriented interface could help with the basics but is no warranty. But I should make myself clearer about "textual-interface". When I say this I was thinking more about a document processor instead of a text processor, following the distinction made by the people of JEdit in their FAQ: Text processors work with text that is used as input of another thing: code for compilers/interpreters, markup languages for browsers, and so on. Document processor on the other hand introduce a metaphor so people is not working with the textual representation, but with the visual representation or something between (like in the What You See Is What You Mean approach of LyX/TeXmacs). I was more pointing to this kind of interface, but I don't use the word "document"-oriented interface because document is a wide word (code snipped, CAS sessions, spreadsheets, mails are all documents). So my distinction was more about where is the center of interaction in interface: in calculation or in writing. TeXmacs for example has it on writing while Sage Notebook it is in calculation. Of course there are intermediate places and my question was more about "how is to be on that places for you?" (you addressed that also, so see my comments behind) > So I definitely think that students should start with a text-oriented > interface and this is one of the main reasons why MathRider is built > on top of a programmer's text editor. I am currently teaching two > sections of a MathRider-based freshman-level college class (and we are > also teaching the same course at a high school as an experiment). > During the past 10 weeks I have spent a significant amount of time > looking over student's shoulders and watching them interact with > MathRider. I have noticed that the standard programmer's text editor > features such as syntax highlighting, line numbers, error > highlighting, folds, hypersearching, rectangular selection, etc. are > all a significant help as the students are learning how to program. > > Beyond this, I have found that the 100% text-based worksheets that > MathRider uses are extremely easy for the students to save, submit for > grading, and share. For example, whole worksheets can easily be sent > through email or submitted for grading through our Moodle course > management system. Parts of worksheets (in the form of code folds) > are also easy to share and submit for grading when sending a full > worksheet is not needed. > > Having said that, we are also in the process of designing a > calculation-oriented interface for MathPiper. Over the past few years > I have studied the interfaces for Mathematica, Maple, MatLab, > wxMaxima, TeXmacs, and MathCad. I have found the MathCad interface to > be the most intuitive and easy to use and so we are basing our > interface on MathCad's interface. But we are not going to encourage > students to use it until after they have learned how to program :-) > > Ted > > I'm a user of TeXmacs. I wrote my undergraduate and master thesis on it. I believe in its slogan: "Writing is a pleasure", at least inside TeXmacs. The thing I like more about it is the fluid experience of writing (and interface is about the experience): you can go to write text to math easily, you have shortcuts, markup, icons, extensibility with CAS sessions. The problem is that using it in Windows is not easy (the most used OS for the students) and that Sage is too big so their integration in a Virtualized Linux that runs inside Windows has penalties in disk space and speed for some computers. Mathrider is cross-platform and I would like to see the same fluid attributes of TeXmacs in it. I see that you can "embed" java apps in frames of the Mathrider interface. Recently I have being testing the use of tablets to give my classes. And I wonder if there is a possibility to integrate a journal tablet interface as the writing math-docs centered part of the interface. The inspiration comes from things like MathJournal[1] and Rapid Pi[2] and Xournal / Jarnal[3]. The idea is to have a frame similar to the ones of Geogebra/Jung and so on with Jarnal in it (how difficult this could be?) and that some parts of Mathrider could be embedded in Jarnal as objects keeping correspondence with their origins, in a similar way to the "drop connected objects interface" of Mathcad. So, if you double click on one of them, you go to the app that is the creator of that object and can made modifications that would be updated in the Jarnal doc. Would be nice to have something as the TeXmacs equation editor for writing the math (I don't know if this is feasible) and also the sage sessions support as a pipe that connects to sagenb.org (or others servers) sends inputs and gets outputs. In that way students with Windows and Internet connections could use Sage from a richer not web-only graphical interface. May be is possible to embed jsmath or jmol inside a frame of Mathrider. [1] http://www.xthink.com/MathJournal.html [2] http://www.rapid-pi.com/ [3] http://www.dklevine.com/general/software/tc1000/jarnal.htm Finally I saw that you were a Sage dev and evangelist and started Mathrider after seeing that Sage went in the math research field instead of the math education one. In my math department there is a believe that "doing serious math stuff" is doing research in pure abstract math and math education is some kind of subscience (is related with the "soft social" sciences of education). I have been in only one Sage Days and yes it was research focused: most of the problems were about optimization of algorithms and so on, and I was the only one with a educative problem (how to publish the TeXmacs + Sage off-line docs created by students as Web Sage Notebooks), but people there were willing to listen if the topic came out (even with my poor spoken English). I don't think that the connector between education and research in mathematics should be an "xor". In my grant I was telling my educational oriented issues about Sage and Mathematics and I got it, so I think that is a matter of being in the community and making efforts about building the bridges, like you do. Hopefully future Sage Days will have more people on both sides (education and research) making them. Cheers, Offray --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
