On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 11:18 AM, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Francois Maltey <fmal...@nerim.fr> wrote: >> >> Dear all, >>> I'm looking for success stories from people who have used Sage in >>> their undergraduate teaching, particularly at the lower years. >>> >>> Also, any advice in convincing one's peers and institution that Sage >>> is an appropriate path to take? In particular, in switching away from >>> a proprietary product. >>> >>> My department is moving away from Maple as a component in our first >>> year teaching, and I may be in a position to influence what we start >>> using next September. I haven't looked over the ciriculum of the >>> current course but it might include calculus, linear algebra, >>> differential equations and various pure maths. >>> >> In my French class I must use maple for tests... But I can use an other >> system for few exercices and my students could use an other system, for >> nicer plot or better mathematics. >> >> A colleague uses alive system on an usb keys or a cdrom when there isn't >> the right program on the computer in his classroom. A sage for ubuntu >> may be useful. >> >> The other PC are 2 or 3 old year PC with windows xp. One time the >> install is done, we don't change any program, it takes time to update 40 PC. >> >> This year I don't promote Sage in my school because I don't know it >> enough, and I can't do the standard exercices I make with maple. I learn >> ! I'll see next year... >> >> I'm not sure that other teachers will quickly change from maple to sage >> for their own calculus because today I see 4 mains difference between >> maple and sage : >> >> 1/ Syntax object.method, mathematics writes function(object) >> 2/ Sage forces to declare symbolic variables, Maple not >> >> The 2 first points are the most important. > > Robert Bradshaw and Mike Hansen have both pointed out before that the > first 2 points could probably easily be changed (via a non-default > mode) in Sage. This would involve evaluating each input block of > code, catching NameErrors, making uncalled names into symbolic > variables and making called ones into formal method calls. It would > probably be easy, and just a few lines of code, and would just totally > solve 1, 2 for people who prefer that behavior (not me). I may try a > mockup of this later today, since it comes up a lot.
Wow, I just did a mockup in only about 30 minutes, and it was shockingly easy. See http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7482 for the single half page of code, which you can paste into the Sage notebook, and which implements a sort of mockup of 1 and 2 mentioned above. -- William -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
