On Fri, Jan 8, 2010 at 5:15 PM, john_perry_usm <john.pe...@usm.edu> wrote:
>So I would ask: do you have a computer lab available? Can you maybe > >convince some below- and above-average students to take on a new after- > >school activity once a week, where they experiment with math in Sage? > > > >(My personal experience was that SOME below-average students would > >perk up if you gave them attention, and might even engage; Well, something like that has actually started happening within class, and I'm very happy about that. Around mid-semester I asked my FST (Functions Statistics Trig) kids if they'd like to learn Python, and they said yes. I was thrilled, so I took them up on it. I started showing them some Python and Sage, and some of them who've never particularly liked math could see some sense in this. One girl told me one day that she really got what sigma was all about for the first time. Their math is really weak, but they're able to follow the logic of simple list comprehensions and functions. I've had them look at Python's turtle, Visual Python, and Sage. One day in the lab we created parabolas made out of 3d spheres floating in space using Visual Python. They liked that. Very simple, but doable and something different. They liked being able to zoom in and around the figures, and I liked the fact that they were getting a sense for list comprehension, which is really just set builder notation. Then in Analysis class we hit matrices this week, and Sage was perfect for this. I was able to show the kids how a matrix is just a list of lists, and I showed how simple it is to create a 'dumb' matrix in Python and then how to make it a 'smart' matrix in Sage. The kids really got how this was very useful, not that all of them have rushed out to master using it, but some have started to take a look at it. Frequently the attitude is why learn it if we can't use it during tests?I haven't been able to do as much pure Python with them - very, very little in fact, because of curricular pressures and larger numbers of kids that are resistant to exploring such things (worried about their gpa). But from what I've seen, if the kids have a reason to buy into it, they really can handle it. That's the main issue - getting them to see that this is a good thing to learn, and that's why I'd like to get a class dedicated to this where everyone was on the same page from day one. I think it was very fortuitous that I got this particular group of FST kids. They've been great, even though, again, their math is really weak. Last remark: having read the AP exam twice, I understand why they > require graphing calculators. They want to ask certain kinds of > questions on the AP exam, and those are generally beyond the scope of > what one can do by hand. QED. Yep. And that's the whole problem. This seems 'challenging enough', and it looks enough like 'computational thinking', so no further discussion seems necessary. Why bother with computers when we already have these nifty hand held devices? That is precisely the level of the conversation. So ... wow.--
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