Hi. > I'm looking for success stories from people who have used Sage > in their undergraduate teaching, particularly at the lower years.
I think this counts as a "success story". I've used Sage in two classes now: Honors Calc I, and MAT 305, a class our department calls "Mathematical Computing", where we basically teach majors who have completed the Calculus sequence some programming. In the past we used Maple. The class was originally designed under three NSF grants, and uses the Springer-Verlag textbook, "Mathematical Computing" by Betounes and Redfern, the professors who designed the course. It had become clear to me that the textbook was no longer appropriate. Maple has changed, and some examples don't work anymore, or if they do, don't work the way the book says. I recall that there's an fsolve () example in our text that gives a different root than the one the book reports, so I guess Maple changed some internals that affect that. I could have looked for a new book that did more or less the same thing, but since I've been using Sage exclusively for the last year and a half, I thought I'd try it with MAT 305. This course for us is not like what people from some universities have to face, where someone expects the students to use what they learn in an engineering or other math course. So I didn't even ask permission; I just went ahead and did it. ;-) It worked out very, *very* well. I switched the textbook to Zelle's "Python Programming" and assigned only the chapters appropriate for Sage (1, 2, 4, 6--8, 13), making adjustments to some exercises as necessary. For example: my students have used the notebook interface more or less exclusively this semester, and the notebook doesn't work well with Python's "input" command, so I had to work around that. Some students installed Sage from their laptops, but most work from the server I run in my office. It's a Dell desktop hand-me-down with 512 MB of RAM, powered by an Intel Pentium 4, running a recent Ubuntu Linux. As someone observed, it can run pretty slow during class time, but it does run. Every now and then it'll hiccup and I have to restart it, but aside from that students have more difficulty with the computers in our labs than with the server. The load on the computer is relatively small: there are 18-19 students in the class, and they pair up on the computers in the lab. Since some use their own laptops, I'd guess there are about 12-15 people running on that server at any one time. I didn't ask for permission; I just went ahead and did it. This might not be a good idea in general. One of the other professors who teaches the course spoke to me after a faculty meeting and said, "I notice you're using Sage for Math Computing. I was thinking of that; how is it working out?" He'll use Maple again next semester, but he's very interested in switching in the long-term. To my knowledge, no students have complained, even though Sage and Windows don't play as easily as (say) Maple and Windows. To the contrary, the students seem to *really* *like* it; the closest thing to a complain I've had was a question last week along the lines of, "I really like this system, and I'd like to use it in the high school classroom, but how easy is it to install and move files from my home computer to my school computer?" etc. Some students were sold, I think, on the fact that they were learning Python programming as a bonus. I mentioned Honors Calculus: I gave them a basic introduction, then assigned occasional worksheets that required Calculus to solve a problem. It could be done by hand, but doing it with Sage was encouraged (and would have left them sane). Most of them responded to it okay, some even loved it, while others just saw it as make-work. I haven't (yet) tried to convince my department on switching completely to Sage, but at least one colleague has switched, and another apparently plans to. The main attractions for us have been cost, open source, and using a fairly standard programming language. The students like the worksheet interface, including the HTML editing for text cells (TinyMCE?). But you do have to be completely honest with the department that running Sage on Linux is easy, while running Sage on Windows machines is non-trivial. It's not hard, but it's not as straightforward as running it on Windows. Hope something in all of that is useful. regards john perry On Nov 15, 5:12 pm, Colin Macdonald <macdon...@maths.ox.ac.uk> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm looking for success stories from people who have used Sage in > their undergraduate teaching, particularly at the lower years. > > Also, any advice in convincing one's peers and institution that Sage > is an appropriate path to take? In particular, in switching away from > a proprietary product. > > My department is moving away from Maple as a component in our first > year teaching, and I may be in a position to influence what we start > using next September. I haven't looked over the ciriculum of the > current course but it might include calculus, linear algebra, > differential equations and various pure maths. > > thanks, > Colin > > -- > Colin Macdonald > University Lecturer in Numerical Analysis > Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College > University of Oxford --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
