As a physical scientist (chemist) who does research and teaches at the undergraduate level I agree with William that STEM is probably a place where Sagemath could be very useful.
However, I'm not sure the reasons are what most people think. Before I try to explain myself, let me explain how presently I use Sagemath in my teaching: 1) I primarily use it as a tool to help students more rapidly do messy symbolic manipulations (most involving integration and differentiation of mathematical models of physical systems). In general the students then need to take the symbolic result and plot it over a physically interesting range or compute a numerical result for specific conditions. 2) I also use tutorials that I built using python within Sagemath to help students learn to convert physical situations into their mathematical representations. A particular example that I use regularly is writing the system of differential equations that represents a complex multi-step chemical reaction. 3) There are other examples, but one that I do not use Sagemath for is analysis of large data sets (we use IGOR, by Wavemetrics, or LoggerPro, by Vernier) because inputting large columns of data using copy and paste (what students will use effectively) does not work well. These other programs also easily make publication quality scientific plots. So why do I think Sagemath is good for STEM? 1) MOST IMPORTANTLY it is open source. This is important because science depends on anybody in the future being able to reproduce your work and for current workers to check that what they are doing is done the way they think it is. Thus commercial (black box) software is difficult to use for good science. If you do a particular analysis of data in a commercial piece of software and that software becomes unavailable or will not run on the machines of another worker then your work is not reproducible. Although it may be difficult, open-source software is more future proof and platform agnostic than commercial compiled code. I make a point of this to my students. If they get a weird result from an open source piece of software they can examine exactly what the code is doing; thus either finding a bug in the code or their procedures or data. With commercial software you are just stuck with the result. That said, I do use commercial software, but carefully limit myself to software that documents exactly how every algorithm is implemented (IGOR references code from _Numerical_Recipes_). In short open source is good science. 2) Science uses a huge array of different mathematical manipulations and representations, thus a project like Sagemath that includes such a wide array of math tools is very useful. 3) Python is used by a lot of the scientific community for manipulation of data files (primarily text representations). Thus Sagemath is a way of introducing students to this. I initially get them hooked by providing a tool that removes some of the drudgery and errors associated with student algebra and calculus manipulations. 4) There are lots of places where Sagemath falls short for STEM use (copy and paste of large data sets, high quality zoomable 2-D graphics, simple tools for computations with significant figures, a units package that handles units the way a physical scientist or engineer does and other problems). However, I have found it easier to teach to my students than Maple (also available on my campus) and cheaper for them long term. I could list more reasons I think Sagemath could be very important to STEM, but #1 is the most important. Jonathan On Wednesday, September 30, 2015 at 5:36:01 PM UTC-5, William wrote: > > > > Sage is very good and useful in many ways to us. However, just as > Bill points out, there are very, very real difficulties, and thinking > about them strategically -- which is what Bill suggested we do above > -- is a really good suggestion. He made a list of questions, and I've > also shared my current strategy above (basically: undergraduate STEM > education!). > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
