Hello everyone, I'm new to the group but I've been tinkering around with Sage for a couple of years. Most of my experience with Sage comes from a calculus class. But I like the fact that Sage uses Python.
This is my first year teaching and my school has several computer labs for general use. So this week, I took my PreAlgebra students to the lab to practice solving equations and also learn a little about programming. All of our work was done on cloud.sagemath.com. It took several days to get students understanding how to use Sage to "solve" equations. I thought I'd share the sort of stuff we were doing so maybe others might find inspiration in it. Sage lets us create symbolic equations and then perform operations on them. Most of our work looked like this: eq = 3*x - 4 == 8 show(eq) eq += 4 show(eq) eq /= 3 show(eq) We could then substitute the number back in to the equation to check that we were right, but in general we kept it real simple. The goal of the project was to help students discover what they need to do to both sides of an equation in order to solve it. Many of my students struggle with what to do with an equation, and so by using Sage they were able to push the arithmetic to the background and just focus on the algebraic process. There were a few students who seemed to learn a little more about Algebra from just experimenting with equations. Overall it was a moderate success, given this was the first experience with programming for all my students. But I do think it was a neat way to introduce programming alongside Algebra, and I plan to continue some degree of integration of the two disciplines. -Brandon Murry -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
