On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Bernd Sing <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi William and Karl-Dieter, > > yes, I did prepare these worksheets on my local Sage installation. I then > posted them on the course Moodle site from where my students got them and > uploaded them to their individual SMC accounts. It was probably good to have > the worksheets actually as .sws-files, since a few of my students also ended > up also installing Sage locally on their machine (well, of course, my > reasoning behind using SMC was that students don't have to install > anything): SMC is/was slow at times - I guess it will improve over time > (thanks everybody for the hard work done there already!) -- although it was > not always SMCs fault but due to some programming issues (often quite > instructional!), e.g., when a self-programmed root finding algorithm uses > symbolic (starting value: 1) instead of numerical (starting value: 1.) > expressions; hopefully my students understand these things now... One issue > is, though, that 'Stop' and 'Restart' don't always stop the current running > calculation and things get stuck.
Stop should always work. Restart is currently broken. You have to click restart, then evaluate something, then evaluate something again -- the first evaluation doesn't work. Fixing this is soon on my list though. (I need to do upgrades, redo sync, and and shared files first.) > Ok, let me continue. Once my student uploaded the worksheets and started > creating their own worksheets/programs, they shared their folder with me so > I could check their work. Sharing is really easy! I was lucky to have a > small class, otherwise it gets a bit confusing/cluttered. Not sure if the > solution for the lecturer would be to create an account for every course one > is teaching (I didn't), or if it would be possible to introduce a > "meta-project" functionality (put all projects from a certain course into > one 'meta-project folder'). Also, while I usually like the 'latest changed > on top' ordering, it is confusing when trying to comment/run through/mark > student files. As a wish, some "note to collaborator" functionality for a > shared folder would be nice, so whenever the collaborator opens the shared > folder a message pops up/can be seen with the comments (in this case with > suggestions or comments about marking to the students, more generally, > comments to the collaborator what has been done and or still needs When I implement proper notifications for the chat system (click on the cartoon icon on the right), then it could server exactly this purpose, especially if I add folder-level chat, in addition to document-level chat. > attention). Also, some 'lock file' functionality would be great, so as a > lecturer you could run/test code but it reverts to the state it was > 'submitted' afterwards (maybe with comment section at the end or next to > the student supplied code? Something like "Try xyz here and you see there is > an issue with your code"). Even after my students shared their project with > me, I still posted the worksheets on the course site - an alternative would, > of course, be to just put a copy into all the students' project folder (I > could have done that manually given my class size this semester), but I > don't know how easy that would be! I'm teaching a class with 40 students right now. I have *all* of their projects mounted as directories in my own project, so I can easily look at any files in any of their projects, copy things out, in, etc. I have a Python program that automates collecting homework, assigning homework, peer grading (redistribution via an n-regular graph, etc.). I haven't made any of these features generally available yet, since there are some interesting usability, robustness, scaling, design, etc., issues to sort out first. > SMC is really good to encourage group work, e.g., for an end-of-semester > project. It is great because students don't have to install anything. Also, > I could easily explain and show code/output on my android tablet (using the > chrome browser) to the students (although, from my experience, changing code > using a tablet is a bit too much fiddeling around in a lecture :-) ). It > already works well enough in a small class setting. It is not yet, I think, > an effective tool to handle mid-sized/large classes where every student > should/has to submit something [On this last remark, maybe something can be > learned from the following awesome MOOC on Coursera > https://www.coursera.org/course/interactivepython (I signed up and took part > last year not least to improve my Python skills in order to use Sage more > effectively :-) ): after submitting an assignment, it is randomly assigned That site says "The only requirement for the class is access to a modern web browser. All coding and program development will be done in a web-based programming environment that supports building interactive applications in Python. " What "web-based programming environments" did they recommend for Python? > to 5 peers for peer marking against a supplied rubric. Again, not sure how > easy something like that would be to implement in SMC, since the underlying > philosophy here seems to be a collaborative one right now, and not that > something is done individual and then locked and 'submitted'. Maybe, to > start with something, all I am saying is that besides collaborative > projects, one also needs some "teacher-student project" functionality? ... I've already implemented this, as mentioned above, but it's not something widely available. There are several difficult issues with making this work truly robustly, due to the highly distributed and redundant design of the system. > Ok, and now I am wondering if SMC could be used to teach Python programming > in CS...] Yes :-) > > Hopefully, these thoughts are helpful (but maybe I want SMC to be too > much...). Thanks, William > > Best > - bernd > > -- > 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/d/optout. -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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/d/optout.
