I've just returned from the NSF conference. There was a big push for teaching, especially related to CAS. I suggested a joint effort with the game industry. The idea would be to use a game like the bridge building game (www.bridgebuilder-game.com) and a CAS.
The idea of the bridge game is to construct a bridge and then apply a load until it fails. Students could start building a simple model of the bridge by attaching matrices to the ends of the beam elements. Then they would predict the force to destroy the bridge and be measured on how close their model is to the actual result. The next class could add stress or strain or young's modulus or gravity load, etc. At the end of 13 weeks, the grades are given by the final ranking kept by the game program. The point of the exercise is to develop the skills to construct models using a CAS. This seems like a "python-can-do-it" kind of project. The NSF person at the conference liked the idea a lot. Tim Daly --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
