William Stein wrote: > If anybody here has any thoughts about how they > would answer these questions, please go for it and respond to this > email answering them.
In an undergraduate setting, I think the Sage notebook, running on a server, is the "killer app." If you are teaching a course that makes use of Sage, you want to get up and running as quickly as possible. You don't want to have freshman with Windows laptops try to do a VMWare installation, and you may not even want to have students with Macs try to build from source. Have them point their browser to sagenb.bigU.edu and you can immediately start learning Sage commands and exploring mathematics. The IT folks on our campus were able to install Sage for on-campus use with no extra direction from me, and were amazed to have it compile and build on the first attempt (on CentOS, I believe). I think over several months I only asked them to restart it once. This summer, we may go for a more secure installation that we can make available to students from off-campus. Of course, sagenb.org on Sun hardware is probably the most impressive example of this - lots of users, wide-open world-wide. And William has mentioned elsewhere how his undergrad Sage class met in a lab with Windows machines, but did their work on sagenb.org. Myself, I was at first most comfortable downloading binaries and working in the notebook. Over time, I've moved to building from source, using the Sage command line, and running Sage scripts from the system command line. So it will go with students - those who are comfortable with an installation on their own machine will do that, etc. For some their natural curiosity will lead them to try new things, but the majority of mathematics students (I didn't say majors) may never leave the "cloud computing" model of working on a notebook server. So in reference to the four questions, for marketing fodder I'd stress the following points. This is all in addition to the natural superiority of an open-source development process for advanced mathematical algorithms and Sage's unified interface to so many powerful and diverse packages. * No license fees or budget hassles. * Easy setup for a central notebook server. * Rapid startup time to productive student use. Rob --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
