[Edu-sig] False alarms?

[A Jorge Garcia]

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, 9:40 AM, at 9:40 AM, kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com> 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 <sergio_r at mail.com>
>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
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>_______________________________________________
>Edu-sig mailing list
>Edu-sig at python.org
>https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20180711/f3219842/attachment.html>