Marshall wrote:
> I have a comment that is a little off-topic but perhaps relevant.
> After talking to some people at the joint meetings in San Diego, and
> especially after using Sage a lot in the classroom this semester, I've
> been struck by the following fact: people who use Sage who are new to
> programming have a lot of trouble figuring out what are pre-defined
> words and what aren't. Maybe this is common knowledge among teachers
> of CS, but it surprised me how big an issue this is. I think it might
> be exacerbated in Sage because of all the functionality. For example,
> here's an actual example from my bioinformatics class, initializing a
> dictionary:
>
> protein_letters = 'ACEDGFIHKMLNQPSRTWVXY'
> amino_dict = {}
> for letter in protein_letters:
> amino_dict[letter] = 0
>
> Many students, when looking at this, cannot tell that "letter" is an
> arbitrary name. You might respond that this is my fault for not
> systematically introducing for loops, and you would be right, but I
> don't have the time to be thorough - I am mainly teaching
> bioinformatics, not programming. Also, I have seen the same confusion
> in other contexts.
This is one of the problems that the Newbies book was designed to solve:
http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/tkosan/newbies_book/
The book assumes that a student has little or no programming
background and it introduces the fundamentals of Sage programming in a
systematic way. I have my students work through the beginning part of
this book as a homework assignment so I don't have to spend much class
time covering fundamental programming topics in lecture. Other
teachers have also contacted me and indicated that the book works
reasonably well for its intended use.
The book doesn't explain what dictionaries are yet but this
information could easily be added.
Ted
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