I have some funding from my university to develop
materials in SAGE for use in my classes. I've hired
two sharp students, one with a good deal of programming experience,
to work on the project. I have two inter-related goals
1. Help to make SAGE more accessible to students:
Develop tutorials, materials for use in class, and
assignments/explorations.
2. Contribute to SAGE development.
This post concerns the educational issues. A post to sage-devel has
some
observations and questions about item 2. Our focus right now is on
group theory.
For both items we are anxious to have some guidance and
collaboration to make our effort broadly useful.
We have started a tutorial, once it's a bit more polished I'll post a
link.
(We've looked at others on the web, and are borrowing ideas, thank
you.)
Here is my wish list for using SAGE in courses, I'm interested in
hearing comments:
A. I'd like elements of A= AbelianGroup( [2,3,4]) to be shown as 3-
tuples.
Currently GAP notation is used, so (1,2,1) is f0*f1^2*f2.
I'd like to write A(1,2,3) to coerce a 3-tuple into A.
B. There is some functionality lacking in SAGE, that it would be very
nice to have
This gets to the development issues, and the relationship with
GAP, so I'll
just mention a few things.
- Some types of groups are absent or difficult to use in SAGE:
Finitely Presented Groups,
Unit Group of a Ring (e.g. U_n and F_p[x]/f(x) ). I'm not sure
how to make a direct product.
- Matrix groups don't have subgroups implemented.
- I like to introduce homomorphisms early and use homomorphsism
between different
types of groups. This appears to be difficult.
C. I would like a "student mode" that would be less intimidating to
the user:
-Reduce the number of functions that appear on tab completion.
For a permutation
group there are 122 completions. Perhaps 20-40 are within the
vocabulary of an
undergrad.
-Simplify error messages.
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