William, This is exactly the kind of student that I had in mind in my response to your marketing email. He is fairly good with computers but not so good with math for various reasons and there are hundreds of thousands of these type of students in the world.
My opinion is that Sage definitely is appropriate for a beginner if they are introduced to it in the right way. My Sage beginner's tutorial has turned into a Sage Beginner's book and I think I can have a useable version of it ready soon. The book takes a ground-up approach to teaching Sage ant it only assumes that the reader understands arithmetic and some beginning algebra as a prerequisite. Here is a link to the current version of the book if anyone wants to take a look at it: http://206.21.94.60/tmp/sage_beginners_book_v.30_alpha.pdf I propose that a 3rd experimental Sage google group be created for CAS beginners like this student and that the beginner's book be used as its focus. I will volunteer to help run the group. Invite this student to join the group along with some other high school students who are interested in learning Sage. These students can then put the book through beta testing so that the bugs can be worked out of it. If the beta test indicates that this approach works, make the group permanent. What do people think? 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/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
