Hello All, I have recently been hired to a middle/high school in an underprivileged neighborhood. That said, although the neighborhood is poor, the school gets a lot of funding and every student gets a laptop. Not only that, but students who are in this middle school should have some familiarity, comfort, and confidence with computers as they have done some html and JavaScript in middle school. As for as the physics program, this will be the first year that the school will offer physics (the high school part is very new) and this is my first year teaching. My original goals were to introduce some "advanced" math (like the derivative and integral) more conceptually and introduce algorithms and computational thinking this year and brush up more on my programming and introduce programming in next years physics course (and use R to analyse data from our experiments). With Sage (and those drop down math functions) and with some python tutorials I have been taking, it looks like I will be able to introduce Sage this year (especially since my school does project based assessments and is exempt from state tests) and it seems like a great tool to focus less on the calculating of math and do more of the physics (and communicating of physics through the language of math). So Sage seems like a great tool and language for me, especially if I have some MLLs (In education ELL stands for English Language Learners and they generally need more support and visual aids since classes tend to be taught in English, but they may struggle with English, so I am equating math in physics to English in any other course where students are Math Language Learners and they are taking Math as a Second, or third or more, Language, MSL). So I really want to use Sage to support in focusing more on math and physics concepts and less on finding exact solutions. That said, I am an inexperienced teacher and I see that Sage has a lot of pre-defined math functions and I was wondering if there are any pit-falls I should worry about as to not rob my students of the chance to use computational thinking and programming (such as asking them to write a program to estimate the integral using math they already know before showing them the integral function in Sage?), or if there are just plenty of chances to great flow charts and programming despite all the predefined functions? Also I would imagine that programming how to estimate the solution to a math problem would reinforce what it means and how it relates to math they already know, but would I have to worry about them losing that understanding if I rely on predefined functions as much? Or would having them plot graphs and maybe writing a couple sentences explaining what it means be enough to reinforce that understanding of the conceptual mathematics ideas/words?
Thank you. Also, if you have any advice for a first year hs physics teacher who may have to build the school's curriculum from the state standards, that would be helpful as well. As of right now, my plan is to have a beginning unit on force and energy that is more conceptual (so students can focus on the concepts) with a research project on solving the energy crisis (my principal seems to like this project idea when I mentioned it to him after he offered me the position). I am thinking that doing it that way can hook the students in the course and begin to build a foundation where they will see examples of force and energy through the year. I also figured that we could now look though physical phenomena through multiple lenses, such as we can look at kinematic equations and draw a constant field of force or derive (Vf)^2 = (Vi)^2 + 2*Accel*(Delta displacement) the normal way and from the point of view of energy (Hint: The work that goes into changing the linear kinetic energy = The change in linear kinetic energy). We could also find the energy of the object. ... I think it would also be useful for the discussion of conservation of momentum and why we can't just use conservation of energy equations. For instance when 2 objects collide and the linear kinetic energy is not conserved, I could ask "why?" and "Where might the energy have gone to?" or if we are looking at a rocket from standstill, "Where could this energy have come from?" And in doing so I am hoping to creating stronger tights into how all these physics topics are related and how we can use them to think about the world around us (and to make physics more conversational instead of just computational, if that makes sense). So if you have any advice, constructive criticism, comments, or anything else that is helpful, it is all welcome. Thank you -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-edu" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-edu+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-edu@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-edu. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
