Hi Colin, I just want to emphasize what the others said in terms of making it easy for students with a local Sage server. Be sure not to have them all using it simultaneously in one class, though! But if you allocate enough GB to memory, it should be able to handle a reasonable class, or many more.
The way I have used Sage most effectively is to introduce it without them needing to know commands. That means either making worksheets where the commands are there, ready for them to change the input, or by creating interacts, where they only need to know how to click and drag, or perhaps type in a number to change a number. Later on, of course, you can have more advanced things possible. But syntactically etc. Sage is no worse, and in many ways better, than the other options. My only concern would be if you send a large number of students to graduate school in a specific discipline where there is a defacto standard (i.e. Matlab in engineering, at least in the US), you may encounter resistance or grad schools may not look on it as kindly - in which case your students will just have to be even better at Sage! But if Maple was your old choice, I don't see that as being an obstacle. Also, one thing in your favor is that you can easily use the Sage notebook in different ways for different courses. If Octave is most appropriate for a linear algebra course, they can use that through the notebook, and if numpy makes more sense elsewhere, you can use python and import numpy - but all from the same interface, all from the same server. So specialized things can be done very easily. Please ask more questions, and let us know how things go. Good luck. - kcrisman --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
