Ted Kosan wrote: > > During the year I was with the Sage project, my main focus was on > education and marketing. I devoted a significant amount of time > trying to figure out ways to get Sage used in high schools and > MathPiperIDE (which use to be called SageIDE) was created to help with > this effort. I eventually concluded that it was infeasible to have > Sage used as a student's first CAS in significant numbers because of > its steep learning curve. I also concluded that it was infeasible to > have PanAxiom or Maxima (or Mathematica, Maple, etc.) used as a first > CAS in significant numbers for the same reason. > > So that is when I came up with the idea of using an entry-level > learning CAS as a way to have students learn the fundamental > programming and CAS skills they need to then go on to learn a > professional-level CAS. MathPiper is that entry-level learning CAS > and this past year we tested MathPiper with high school students and > college freshman and it was very successful. Sometime this Fall we > will officially announce MathPiper and start actively marketing it. >
I wonder why you think you need special CAS. I mean, you clearly want easier user interface. To control error messages you may want your own programming language. But it is not clear for me why you want new "computational engine". > Something that will help with this marketing effort is that GeoGebra > (http://geogebra.org) uses MathPiper as its main CAS and GeoGebra is > coming out with an very entry level CAS called GeoGebraCAS which uses > MathPiper as its computation engine. GeoGebra has over 100,000 users > world-wide and when GeoGebraCAS is released, MathPiper should get a > significant amount of exposure from this. > > But MathPiper was designed to be a stepping stone to a > professional-level CAS and I am still in the process of determining > which one it should be so that it can benefit from the marketing > effort we will be starting soon. FriCAS would be a good fit for this > professional-level CAS, especially since both MathPiper and FriCAS are > Lisp-based and we plan on teaching the more advanced MathPiper > students about Lisp. > > However, I would like to know if the FriCAS team is interested in > having this amount of exposure for FriCAS? Supporting a significant > amount of users is difficult and distracting, so perhaps you would > prefer to keep a mostly low profile? > We could support much more users that we have now. However, it is important to manage user expectations. Users frequently want to do things which no current CAS can do, and sometimes other system can serve users better than FriCAS. If users come with too high expectations then this will be frustrating both for them and for FriCAS team. Assuming that your marketing efforts will be based on FriCAS capabilities they are welcome. -- Waldek Hebisch [email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "FriCAS - computer algebra system" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fricas-devel?hl=en.
