On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 9:37 PM, Brandon Murry <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Cool. Good luck! > -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. -- 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.
