I have recently used sage for teaching a 3rd year undergraduate
lecture in number theory. As part of a "teaching development cycle"
that I am required to do by the University, I also included a little
questionnaire at the end. The outcome of this may be relevant for this
discussion.
There were about 20 students and half of them were familiar with
matlab and maple.
* Most students claimed that learning the basics of sage was just as
easy as learning the basics of the other CAS'. A few said they found
it easier.
* Noone complained about python notation foo.bar()
* Some complained about the error messages. Say if one types
for n=1 to 9:
print n
one gets an error at print n. That is confusing especially in more
complicated code.
* The majority of the students thought that it is important the
University should work with free open-source software. (I did not do
any propaganda before !)
* 2/3 of the students blame themselves and 1/3 the software when
something does not work.
* They were are impressed by @interact.
>From my perspective the biggest problem was that I did not allocate
enough resources to the virtual server the notebook was running on.
I was a bit disappointed with the documentation for setting up a
server etc. For instance the docstring of the notebook still contains
lines like
nb = load('./sage/sage_notebook/nb.sobj')
which do not seem to apply any longer.
Subject-specifically: The problem of creating variables did not enter,
but I like William's automatic_creation, which should be useful for
teaching calculus. I had troubles justifying
Mod(2,3) in ZZ
True
after having explained them that classes of residues are not
integers !
Chris.
--
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].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=.
