michel paul wrote: > Hi, > > I'm a high school math teacher experimenting with getting kids to use > SAGE. My situation - high school math in a department that rigidly > believes either that > > 1. graphing calculators provide sufficient technology for > contemporary math classrooms or that > 2. technology is something secondary to the mathematics itself - it > might be 'useful', but it's not what mathematics itself is about. > > It has been extremely frustrating trying to communicate in this > environment. Ideally my vision would be to create a computational > analysis kind of course where the kids would first learn how to > articulate basic math concepts in pure Python. Things like the > Euclidean Algorithm. Simple enough but important enough to focus on > for good computational ways to think. Important - the point wouldn't > be Python per se. The point would be computational thinking. How can > we analyze tasks or concepts? Then show them what they have access to > in SAGE. Wow. There's absolutely no rational reason at all why a > course like that shouldn't be promoted. > > Well, anyway, at the moment I've opted for a strategy to weave SAGE > into the curriculum as unobtrusively as possible. I have been > successful in getting all my kids to open up SAGE notebook accounts. > I've decided to weave in the use of SAGE as we work through our > standard text. I'm going to use SAGE as my blackboard as often as > possible, and I'm posting SAGE notebook worksheets paralleling the > examples in our text for the kids to experiment with. It's a weird > balance - trying to introduce using Python or SAGE to kids who have > never associated that with 'math'. Funny, their attitudes actually > parallel 1 and 2 above. It's such a weird culture. But other kids > are seeing that, yeah, this really is pretty cool. So I hope to build > momentum from that. > > So we are about to study interval notation. I'm going to show them > how interval notation means something different in SAGE than it does > in their texts. However, there's lots of ways they are related. > > My question - the text expects them to express things like (1, 4) > intersect [2, 8] on a number line to produce the graph of [2, 4). > That kind of stuff. It will also ask them to solve and graph typical > linear inequalities, absolute value inequalties, etc. Is there a way > to easily illustrate this in SAGE? > > I was contemplating discussing something like an interval testing > function. But I also notice that testing something like > > 2.3 in [1 .. 3, step = .1] > > produces False. Issues like this can be a booby trap with already > reluctant learners. >
You might also note that Sage has some rather sophisticated interval arithmetic capabilities: sage: myinterval= RIF((1,3)) sage: myinterval 2.? sage: myinterval.str(style='brackets') '[1.0000000000000000 .. 3.0000000000000000]' sage: 2.3 in myinterval True sage: myinterval.intersection(RIF(2,5)).str(style='brackets') '[2.0000000000000000 .. 3.0000000000000000]' sage: sin(myinterval).str(style='brackets') '[0.14112000805986721 .. 1.0000000000000000]' sage: (myinterval^2+2*myinterval+2).str(style='brackets') '[5.0000000000000000 .. 17.000000000000000]' also: sage: RIF((1,oo)) [1.0000000000000000 .. +infinity] Jason --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
