On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 05:56:00PM -0500, Nicholas Tomasic wrote: > Hi, > > I'm a 12th grade Calculus teacher at a school in Toronto, Ontario, and I'm > thinking about incorporating Python into an Independent Study Project for > two of my students. Both are passionate about coding with Python and I'm > thinking of asking them to produce something that can either a) calculate > derivatives of simple functions or b) assign 1 student the product rule, > one the quotient rule, and have them write a program that can tackle > derivatives in those forms.
Sounds like a very reasonable project. An alternative is to give them a project to work with SymPy, which is a symbolic algebra package for Python. I presume that Yr 12 students have access to CAS calculators in Canada, is that right? Perhaps you could get them to write a comparison between the differentiation capabilites of their CAS and that of SymPy. The advantage to *you* is that this doesn't require any programming skill on your part, since your students will be submitting an essay rather than a computer program you will need to judge. Another idea might be to get them to write a small program that randomly generates a simple polynomial, asks the user to differentiate it, and then checks their answer against what SymPy calculates. http://www.sympy.org/en/index.html > The problem is: I know very little about Python. That would be a problem :-) Do you have any programming experience at all? If it's just a matter that you aren't familiar with Python, I can suggest running through a tutorial or two, and then asking questions here. If you have no programming experience at all, this may be a bit hard on you, since your students will know more about programming than you. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
