William wrote: >By the way, I hope you'll consider letting us distribute your tutorial >too when it is done.
I would be more than happy to, but perhaps I should explain in more detail what I am striving to achieve. I teach in a computer engineering technology curriculum at a state university in Ohio and we are starting to offer post-secondary courses to high school students through a distance learning initiative. We have found that most high school students we have come in contact with so far are very weak in math, their computer skills are light, and their programming skills are virtually nonexistent. Therefore, one of our main goals is to develop educational materials that are specifically designed to help fix this problem. As part of this process, I have been searching for open source mathematics software that has a modern programming environment intimately integrated into it. I also wanted it to be alive and well 20 or 30 years from now. After a long and grueling search I have finally decided to go with Sage. I think that Sage's design philosophy is brilliant and the balance it strikes between mathematics and computing is exceptional. The process of choosing Sage, however, was easy compared to figuring out a way to teach students who have no programming background, and very light computer skills, how to successfully use it. My solution was to develop pre-Sage educational materials that provide students with the computer and foundational programming skills that they need. Here is a document that shows the topics I am planning to cover: http://206.21.94.60/tmp/course_modules_map_v1.08.pdf And here is a link to the materials I have already developed: http://206.21.94.60/tkosan/distancelearning/etec150/lectures/ I have just started working on the Sage-related materials and I will be developing these throughout the rest of the summer. Anyway, I have not released these materials under an open source license yet, but I plan to sometime this summer. At that time you will be more than welcome to distribute any of these materials through the Sage site if you would like :-) Ted --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URLs: http://sage.math.washington.edu/sage/ and http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
