I have been working on ways to make SAGE as easy to use as possible for beginners because I am interested in encouraging high school students to use SAGE. The approach I have been working on recently is to embed a scientific calculator into the notebook that SAGE newbies should be able to start using immediately with zero SAGE training.
The calculator is still at an early stage of development, but there is enough running that people can start playing with it. Here is a screenshot: http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/tkosan/misc/mathrider_applet.png And if people want to play with it, just open a worksheet in FireFox and evaluate the following text in a cell: html('<applet id="mathrider" code="org.mathrider.MathRider.class" width="800" height="650" codebase="http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/tkosan/mathrider/"; archive="mathrider.jar" MAYSCRIPT></applet>') At this point it only works in FireFox but hopefully it will eventually work in IE too. The Calculator, 2D plotter, and 3D plotter are not talking to the SAGE server yet, but the text areas in the Cell tab are. Type something simple like "m = 7" into the Send text area and press <shift><enter>. The code will be sent to the SAGE server for evaluation and a response will be printed in the Receive text are. If one then goes to an empty cell in the notebook and enters "print m", 7 will be printed. At this point I am still trying to get my mind around the details of the communications between the notebook and the server and I will probably be asking questions about the communications protocol in the near future. Ted --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
