I don't agree with Ted's implication that to serve the precollege
community well a CAS' graphical environment needs to be "specifically
designed" to met their needs.
For example Mathematica's GUI supports both simple computations and
sophisticated ones without having two different notebook interfaces in
one GUI. Although Wolfram Research sells CalcCenter, a product for
teaching and learning lower level mathematics, it directly markets
Mathematica as being ideal for precollege education.
I don't see the need for a system for only simple computation in the
context of precollege education. In fact I think it would complicate
matters for the Sage education team because they would be supporting
two different environments that both support precollege education
potential well.
I personally find Mathrider to be far more complicated looking than
Mathematica. I think the screencasts at
http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/precollege/videos/ are very
compelling as they demonstrate how elegant the environment is and
Mathematica's wide range of precollege functionality. Whereas the
Flash demo of Mathrider seems to show a complicated environment that
provides the same functionality as Sage's interact decorator and
Mathematica's manipulate function.
I think Sage is well on it's way to being a strong completer to
Mathematica in this area with the Notebook and Interact. Maybe the two
key things to do to increase the popularly of Sage in precollege
education are to create lots of examples of the great functionality
already present and to clone the organizational features in
Mathematica that are so supportive of education.
Why spend your time creating an entirely new approach to teaching
mathematics with a computer when Mathematica is so popular and has
already inspired so much in Sage related to education? Can't we just
say hey Mathematica is doing great lets just do what it does?
On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 5:44 PM, William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> What is your honest opinion about Ted's claimed solution below?
>
>
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Ted Kosan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Date: Mon, May 12, 2008 at 1:34 PM
> Subject: Re: Opensource math
> To: William Stein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
>
> William wrote:
>
> >This is possibly right up your ally.
>
> Thanks, I will contact Trevor to see if I can assist him.
>
> BTW, I think I came up with a solution to the Sage/Education problem
> (actually, it appears to be a Sage-Axiom-Maxima/Education problem).
> The solution is to start students with a simpler CAS system inside of
> a "notebook" which has been specifically designed to meet the needs of
> education. When students have eventually outgrown the simpler system,
> then move them to a more sophisticated system.
>
> This solution achieves the separation which is needed between the
> educational-focused group and the research-focused group while at the
> same time providing the research-focused group with a steady stream of
> new users which already have a certain level of CAS experience.
>
> Anyway, here is what my version of an education-oriented CAS system
> looks like and I am hoping to have an initial release in early June.
> It takes a number of great ideas from the Sage notebook and implements
> them in a different way.
>
>http://mathrider.org
>
> Ted
>
>
>
> --
> William Stein
> Associate Professor of Mathematics
> University of Washington
> http://wstein.org
>
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