Le vendredi 3 mars 2017 23:20:42 UTC+1, rjf a écrit : > > If you were teaching calculus, at what point would you want > your students to take out a smartphone and do integrals? > > At least as soon as they are at level n+1 if integration is teached at level n. At level n, make 2 kinds of exam: one with CAS and one without.
How much time would you allocate to teaching the syntax > of the CAS, what to do with error messages, how to download > the latest copy, etc.? > My own experience with Xcas on a desktop is that it takes less than 1h for 1st year students to be able to do basic CAS stuff (simplify, derive, integrate, plot, etc.) and a little more with CAS calculators. Running Xcas on a smartphone is really straightforward, just open the URL <http://www-fourier.ujf-grenoble.fr/~parisse/xcasen.html>, while installing it locally for an exam takes a few more steps (install an unarchive app, run it and locate the HTML5 page on the device). And what benefit would this be to > the student who may still need to solve problems without > a CAS for a written exam? > I believe that CAS devices should be allowed for exam except for short interrogations where you check very basic stuff. That could be calculators, or smartphone/tablets with some way to disconnect them from the network. > Or do we assume that it is no longer necessary to teach > methods of integration, just as it is no longer necessary > to teach how to compute square-roots, or how to > interpolate in a table of logarithms. > It depends. Integration by part for example should be teached. Or integrating simple rational fractions (say denominators of degree 2). But I believe it is not required anymore to teach how to compute by hand higher degree fractions like 1/(x^2-1)/(x^2+x+1)^2, today it's more important to know how to do it with a CAS and how to check that you did not make a typo. > Having taught a calculus + computer lab many years > ago (1973! at MIT), the students were more interested > in the Risch algorithm (simple version) than "regular" > stuff. Even today, calculus classes don't teach that, do they? > > Of course no, and there is one good reason for that: most colleagues do not even know what the Risch algorithm is about. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
