Offray wrote: > Seems a pretty interesting program. As kcrisman says it can fill the gap > between geogebra and Sage. I think that working in that unfilled spaces > is important from and educative perspective. In fact there was a Sage > variant called SPD (Source Python Distribution) that start small and > could (theoretically) grow up to (normal) Sage. The bridge that you > create between Geogebra or Yacas and Sage with this project and the > concern with interface and education is something worth. I will show > this project to my students.
I also think that a good way to significantly increase the size of the Sage user base is to start beginners with a simpler computer algebra system and then to provide a bridge from this simpler system to Sage. This should also be a good way to significantly reduce the amount of questions that are submitted to the Sage email lists from CAS newbies. > * I saw that you create mathpiper as a fork of yacas. Could you say me > more about this (yacas was one of my favorite CAS before Sage and still > has a "place in my heart" because of his philosophy, size and language > syntax sugar). I began using Yacas with SageIDE because its small size allowed me to easily experiment with various ways that a CAS could be made to interact with a GUI front end. My initial goal was to only use Yacas as a way to discover these promising interaction techniques and then use the techniques with a more powerful CAS (like Sage), However, after working with Yacas for a while I discovered that it was much more powerful and flexible than I first thought it was. I also discovered that beginners were able to learn the Yacas programming language easier than any other CAS language I had tried. I then decided that I wanted to start fixing the bugs that were in Yacas and to also begin modifying it to work with a GUI front-end easier. Since the Yacas project had been dormant for a while, I decided to fork JYacas and call the fork MathPiper. The fork happened in the Spring of 2008 and since that time myself and one other developer have spent hundreds of hours refactoring JYacas, fixing its bugs, and adding enhancements to it. A couple of pieces of information which are related to this are 1) MathPiper is the CAS that GeoGebra uses internally and 2) the GeoGebra team is coming out with their own education-oriented CAS called GeoGebraCAS which uses MathPiper as its computation engine. > * Do you say that mathpiper can run as an applet in a web browser. Yes, MathPiper can run as an applet in a web browser and it can also run as a stand-alone application apart from MathRider. When running as an applet, one can use its GUI console to interact with it but one could also use it with a Javascript-based GUI in a browser. Actually, it might even be possible to use MathPiper as the computation engine for a mildly modified Sage Notebook and have both of them run completely within a browser. > Have > you seen 280slides.com? Do you think that is possible to build a web > interface for Mathrider in a similar fashion? I have seen 280slides and my understanding is that it is built with a framework that compiles the code a web application is written in into Javascript. I am not sure if it would be possible to build a web interface for MathRider using this technology. For MathRider, I have chosen the strategy of simply following the GeoGebra team's technique for distributing math software because they have been able to grow a 100,000+ member user community this way. Beyond this, I view Texas Instrument's graphing calculators as MathRider's main competition and my goal is for MathRider to be widely used in the very inexpensive netbook-size computers that I think most students world wide will eventually be using. For this purpose, using MathRider as a traditional application works fairly well. > * Java is everywhere. How feasible is to give python support in > Mathrider using jython? Providing python support in MathRider via jython is actually easy to do because MathRider uses the JEdit programmer's text editor as its application framework and there is a very nice jython plugin that is available for JEdit. This plugin makes it possible to use python to customize and extend MathRider the same way that lisp is used to customize and extend Emacs. Ted --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
