I can't claim it's effective, but so far this is what I'm doing - As much as possible I try to use the SAGE notebook as my blackboard. At the beginning of this year I had my students open their own SAGE notebook accounts as their first HW assignment.
In my Analysis classes I enter the example problems for the lesson using LaTeX beforehand. Then in class I show them various ways to express the ideas in Python/Sage. My school uses SmartBoard airliner slates, so I use that to write directly on top of the SAGE notebook. That's useful for comparing the computational approach to the traditional hand-written form. I then publish the notebook page at sagenb and post the link along with the HW assignment online. In my FST (Functions, Statistics, Trig) classes I'm actually having them learn pure bare-bones Python! Around the 10-week marking period I could see that the mid-semester doldrums had start to set in, so one day I asked, "Would you guys like learn Python?" I was very pleased to get a strong positive response, as I've been trying for years to create a fusion CS/math course and have been met with unbelievable resistance, both from students and staff. The primary reason the students have been resistant has to do with grades. The kids at our school are terribly grade conscious, and the suggestion of using Python in class immediately sounds 'hard'. The primary reason for resistance on the part of my colleagues and department chair has to do with graphing calculators. Their attitude is, hey, we've got these great calculators. Why introduce something else when the calculator is 'good enough?' Wow - I am still amazed as I reflect back on all the frustrating conversations I've had. I keep saying, look, these things are used NOWHERE outside of a high school math classroom. Why not show the kids how things are ACTUALLY done? So fortunately the kids were interested in exploring Python. Though you can use Sage without knowing Python, I think it's a whole lot better to become fluent in bare-bones Python to get the most out of Sage. According to our curriculum, we are supposed to be studying transformations of functions and data - so I've been doing lots of stuff with list comprehensions. I've been having them do stuff in the Python shell, and then showing them how the same thing also works in Sage, plus you get lots of other great stuff, like easy graphing. One thing I've concluded - though it is possible in SAGE to directly plot various functions, I think it's better for the kids to first construct lists of ordered pairs as list comprehensions and then to plot them using 'points' or 'line'. That way they can see by doing that as you increase the number of steps you get a smoother and smoother graph. My dream is to create a fusion math/CS course. I came an inch close to having it happen for this year - but the course wasn't really supported by my dept chair and was never officially put into the schedule, so kids couldn't sign up for it. However, as it turns out, there actually was more interest on the part of the students than the administration wanted to admit, and I'm continuing to push for it. Eventually it HAS to happen. Ultimately I want to create a Computational Analysis course using the Litvin text Math for the Digital Age <http://www.skylit.com/mathandpython.html>. I think it would be a wonderful book. We would begin there, and whatever topics in the Analysis curriculum that were not addressed in that book we would bring in as needed. I'm very much interested in getting something like this to happen, and I'd like to know if anyone is doing something like that anywhere. - Michel Paul On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Chris Seberino <cseber...@gmail.com> wrote: > How are people using Sage for high school math effectively? > > I've tried a few things and discovered it isn't obvious how to use > Sage effectively for high school students. > > (This isn't a fault of Sage, but rather, is caused by fact that good > teaching is hard and students aren't simple machines.) > > Chris > > -- > > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "sage-edu" group. > To post to this group, send email to sage-...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<sage-edu%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu?hl=en. > > > -- "Computer science is the new mathematics." -- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To post to this group, send email to sage-...@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.
