Steve Litt wrote:
On Wednesday 31 October 2007 07:16, pol wrote:
I am in touch with high school teachers in italy where an attempt is on
going to teach students to use latex/lyx to write down exercises, with
their development and comments.
Since probably more schools/univs in the world are involved with that sort
of prgram, i am wondering whether it is worth the effort to form an
authoritative committee to set up a syllabus, to assess student skills.
Any suggestions about italian possible members?
I am also considering to open an italian lys-users mailing list. Any
comments and support is welcome.
thank you
The following is my opinion -- I'm sure others have their own opinions...
When you say "teach students to use latex/lyx to write down exercises", that
can mean two different things:
1) The student is given a complete document class containing ALL the
environments and char styles needed, so he can use LyX like a word processor.
Is this a problem? LyX comes with lots of nice document
classes already. And it is the school who decides
what an exercise should look like. If they can say "use LyX",
then they can also say that "article" is the
standard layout for an exercise. Easy enough if they
don't want to make layouts of their own.
2) The student is expected to create some of his own environments and
character styles.
#1 is very doable for the student, #2 won't work at all.
Sure, unless it is a programming class. :-)
LaTeX is a programming language macro set, and not a simple one. Human
experience in a variety of societies and cultures is that only a minority of
people have the ability and interest to handle computer programmming. As if
it isn't hard enough, writing LaTeX capable of interfacing with LyX is even
more difficult. For instance, in LaTeX it's perfectly OK to nest
environments, but LyX cannot use nested environments. Then there's the fact
that the whole edit/compile/view cycle is more difficult and time consuming
in LyX.
Bottom line, unless the school system is willing to write a set of very
complete document classes for the students, OpenOffice would be a much better
tool for students to do their exercises.
I am not sure the school system needs to do that much, unless
they want to. Just go with what LyX has to offer, and perhaps
some template documents.
Helge Hafting
