Offray wrote, > Thanks for your answers. I think also that starting simple and small is > a way to increase the use of Sage also. My questions about interface and > language because I'm trying to use CAS in education with notebooks with > a textual oriented interface instead of notebooks with a calculation > oriented one. This is because I want to emphasize problem solving using > the heuristics of George Polya, so textual description of the students > interpretation of the problem is more important that calculations. In > this regard the notebook web interface has some issues and the > integration of tinyMCE is a good step on user friendliness but there is > a escape of the WYSIWYG metaphor to LaTeX code when there is a need to > write math (and of course in a problem solving oriented math course is > supposed to pass a lot). A work around that I'm using is the TeXmacs > interface for Sage, but then I lose all the nice collaborative and > ubiquitous features of the sage web interface. Having a nice equation > editor integrated with tinyMCE (may be made in something similar to > 280slides) would be a good step towards a textual oriented interface. Of > course you're thinking supercalculator integrated in a small form factor > laptop, but also you're thinking about filling the gaps so knowing your > thoughts about the gap between textual oriented and calculation oriented > interface would be a nice thing, even if this is not planed for mathrider.
My opinion on the text-oriented interface vs. a calculation-oriented interface issue is that a student needs to learn how to program first before using a calculation-oriented interface. One reason for this is that after one knows how to program, learning mathematics is significantly easier. Another reason is that it is fairly easy for a student who knows how to program a CAS to learn how to use a calculation-oriented interface to it. However, I have found that knowing how to use a calculation-oriented interface does not prepare a student at all for learning how to program. So I definitely think that students should start with a text-oriented interface and this is one of the main reasons why MathRider is built on top of a programmer's text editor. I am currently teaching two sections of a MathRider-based freshman-level college class (and we are also teaching the same course at a high school as an experiment). During the past 10 weeks I have spent a significant amount of time looking over student's shoulders and watching them interact with MathRider. I have noticed that the standard programmer's text editor features such as syntax highlighting, line numbers, error highlighting, folds, hypersearching, rectangular selection, etc. are all a significant help as the students are learning how to program. Beyond this, I have found that the 100% text-based worksheets that MathRider uses are extremely easy for the students to save, submit for grading, and share. For example, whole worksheets can easily be sent through email or submitted for grading through our Moodle course management system. Parts of worksheets (in the form of code folds) are also easy to share and submit for grading when sending a full worksheet is not needed. Having said that, we are also in the process of designing a calculation-oriented interface for MathPiper. Over the past few years I have studied the interfaces for Mathematica, Maple, MatLab, wxMaxima, TeXmacs, and MathCad. I have found the MathCad interface to be the most intuitive and easy to use and so we are basing our interface on MathCad's interface. But we are not going to encourage students to use it until after they have learned how to program :-) 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
