Comgrats! I really like what I am hearing here! I won that battle
last year, but the aprooval came so late that it could not be
scheduled. This year I am having trouble with enrolment as these kids
are booked! I am trying to run a Calculus Research Lab using SAGE and
the free Calculus PDFs on sagemath.
I have an intro programming class where I am switching to SAGE/python
and descrete math that has good enrolment, however!
HTH,
A. Jorge Garcia
http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com
Teacher & Professor
Applied Mathematics, Physics & Computer Science
Baldwin Senior High School & Nassau Community College
-----Original Message-----
From: wdjoy...@gmail.com
To: sage-edu@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, Jun 7, 2010 9:27 am
Subject: Re: [sage-edu] what should be taught?
Are you going to teach programming (eg, Python) in this course?
Seems like you are leaning towards discrete math+precalc topics.
Is that correct?
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 11:40 AM, michel paul <mpaul...@gmail.com> wrote:
To make a long story short, I won. I'm very happy to be able to say
that.
It was an unbelievable roller coaster ride - at one moment it seemed
like
it would happen, at another I got kicked in the teeth. Round and
round. I
started on the very first day of school this year, and it's taken
until now,
but finally, it's going to happen. I get to create a computational
math
analysis course for next year.
Here are some things I've been thinking about - it seems that in the
PreCalc
texts used at our school, sequences, series, combinations,
probability, etc.
are all handled towards the end of the second semester. However, in a
computational approach, it seems that sequences and series should be
done
early first semester, as all kinds of things can then be constructed
from
them. Thinking in terms of lists created from other lists is
fundamental.
That stuff should be done early. And I think there should be more
emphasis
on number theory. Our traditional texts don't really get into that.
The
fact that the primary types of number are programmable data types in
Sage I
think is really cool, and I'd like to make good use of that in an
analysis
course.
I also think matrices should be done early. Again, in our current
texts
this is a later topic. But in a computational approach it's easy to
think
of and create a list whose elements are other lists.
Does it make sense to say that our current secondary curriculum is
organized
as it is because it evolved in an age of handwriting? When doing
things by
hand we tend to emphasize single letter variables, but when doing
things
computationally it makes a whole lot more sense to use descriptive
variables
and function names.
One of the big points I made in presenting a computational approach
is that
all kinds of lip service is paid to the theme of 'writing in the math
curriculum', but no one is quite sure what that entails. Well, that's
what
programming is! Programming is using language to describe
unambiguously how
to solve problems of a certain type.
I would be very interested in practical suggestions anyone might have
for a
computationally organized high school math curriculum. Ultimately I
think
an entirely new kind of high school math curriculum will be
necessary, but
at the moment, here in the trenches, it's one step at a time.
Thanks very much,
Michel
--
"Computer science is the new mathematics."
-- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou
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