> > 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 >
That is awesome, good luck! > 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 > I think that you need not worry about this, especially at the level you are talking about. If someone is that ambitious, that is a "good thing". And you should have plenty of ways to enforce doing things "by hand" in the type of assignments you give - you can see many of the discussions online about inquiry-based learning regarding this. I often use the phrase "approximate this thing" in such situations, for instance. Since you're doing physics, presumably at one more remove from the computation, hopefully it would be even easier to design activities that stay away from this. 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 > Ah, this is the harder part. Building ANY curriculum from scratch is a huge, huge, HUGE amount of work. I strongly recommend that you use as much as you can of some pre-built curriculum, even if it is not ideal. Then you can guard your energy and strength into replacing some material with your own activities, or introducing computational ones at appropriate points... because trying to reinvent that wheel from scratch, especially given the high school teaching load, is a recipe for burnout. Especially if you have the flexibility to take a little longer with concepts the first time, you can afford to do "your own computational and conceptual" versions of some of the curriculum's material. The students never even have to know! But just creating it from whole cloth sounds very challenging. Even putting in a few Sage cell activities in an otherwise normal setup might be well worth it, depending on your goals, as Jorge reminds us! Good luck. -- 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.
