Re: False alarms?

Hola Jorge,

Thanks for pointing out your blog, Jorge.

I have explored Sage as a much madure open source alternative

to Mathematica than Sympy (the other one I like is Maxima). It

is really great as you have shown in your blog for calculus in several

variables.

An issue for me, though, is that it is an stand alone system and apparently it is not callable

from a Python session (I have found no way of doing so as we can do

with SymPy). Like that it is like using Maxima on its own.

Salut,

Sergio

a python session

Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2018 at 9:59 AM

From: "A Jorge Garcia" <[email protected]>

To: "kirby urner" <[email protected]>

Cc: "Sergio Rojas" <[email protected]>, "A Jorge Garcia via Edu-sig" <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] False alarms?

FYI, I dumped Graphing Calculators completely in my Multivariable Calculus class that I'm teaching right now during summer session at the local community college.

I'm using SageCell, have a look, http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com and http://www.youtube.com/calcpage2009

HTH,

AJG

Sent from BlueMail

On Jul 10, 2018, at 9:40 AM, kirby urner <[email protected] > wrote:

Hi Sergio --

Per this article, with so many states and no national curriculum (I don't advocate for one), it's tough to generalize about US schools:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/07/americas-schools/564413/

Now, to generalize :-D

The mathematics classroom was rarely also a computer lab. If the school has a computer lab, that's usually a separate facility and they learn business applications and typing, rarely much programming, until rather recently.

Today, schools likely have Chromebooks in large charging cabinets on rollers. Fewer schools give out Chromebooks to each student but that's the trend, perhaps from 6th or 7th grade up.

The mathematics curriculum has never integrated any programming as there's still that sense that programming takes years to learn and would be a huge detour. Those of us more familiar with the state of the art don't see it that way.

You're right that Mathematica paved the way for a small subculture and I-Python, Sage, Jupyter Notebooks, SymPy do feature in some US schools, but very few.

Rather than integrate mathematics and learning to code, the strong belief is we need to keep math and computer science separated, which means teaching a lot of things twice, given the Venn Diagram shows large overlap.

Your book, which I've been reading, takes the more integrated approach that I favor.

Math teachers are in a tough position I think, as a lot of the mathy content that students find most attractive is being placed in another subject area.

I have my opinions about all this, as a former high school math teacher turned applications programmer and teacher-trainer.

https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/the-plight-of-high-school-math-teachers-c0faf0a6efe6

Finding a lot of computer science teachers in a hurry is the name of the game right now, and lots of educators are selling on ramp teacher training programs. That's becoming a big business.

I expect many with a math teaching background are currently migrating to computer science, so in some sense my desire for better integration is being fulfilled. Some of this on ramp programs teach a language called Pyret, which we're told is the better way to go.

Kirby

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 5:13 AM, Sergio Rojas <[email protected] > wrote:

> here's a blog post raising the alarm

> that Python (among others) is "completely incompatible with mathematics".

>

>

> https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2017/01/09/integrating-computer-science-in-math-the-potential-is-great-but-so-are-the-risks/

I get lost reading the referred blog post. I was

under the impression that the ideas presented in the

post were already fully discussed back in the 90's,

when Mathematica was getting its way into the

classroom at US schools. That things like "x = x + x"

were already familiar to teachers.

In fact, I was thinking of an open source alternative to Mathematica

when writing the book on Prealgebra via Python Programming

( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325473565 ), with the

advantage that Python can be used for intensive computing task as

well as for symbolic (algebraic) computations (like mathematica)

via SymPy.

I was under the idea that the Mathematica team has already shaped and

polished the road. I can see that I was wrong. It is still very, very

rough (much more than the first draft of my book).

Sergio

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