[Edu-sig] if I taught high school calculus today... (kirby urner)

[Perry Grossman]

Yes, interesting post.

It would be great to see calculus taught in Jupyter notebooks.

Allen Downey's work is great.

I am watching his SciPy 2017 computational stats talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He9MCbs1wgE

Also, interesting, Christopher Fonnesbeck - Introduction to Statistical
Modeling with Python - PyCon 2017:
https://youtu.be/TMmSESkhRtI


Perry

On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 12:00 PM, <edu-sig-request at python.org> wrote:

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>    1. if I taught high school calculus today... (kirby urner)
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> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 19:50:28 -0800
> From: kirby urner <kirby.urner at gmail.com>
> To: "edu-sig at python.org" <edu-sig at python.org>
> Subject: [Edu-sig] if I taught high school calculus today...
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>
> I was a high school calculus teacher (also algebra, geometry, trig) first
> job outta university, stuck with it for two years.
>
> Fast forward to almost age 60, and I'm teaching coding to middle schoolers,
> thinking it's all still math. [1]
>
> Shouldn't take a "computer scientist" to cover this stuff... Algorithms are
> algorithms after all.
>
> Were I to teach calculus today, in light of what I now know, I'd focus on
> probability density functions right when we get to integration, as "area
> under the probability curve" is precisely how we figure out  chances of
> something happening.
>
> We would use Jupyter Notebooks with SciPy, all free & open source.
>
> As I recall, our calc curriculum never did much to bridge to statistics,
> but in SciPy / NumPy, every continuous probability distribution function
> (PDF) comes with a cumulative distribution function (CDF) that's defined
> exactly as a definite integral between A and B, and giving the probability
> some x in distribution X falls between A and B.
>
> Forming a bridge twixt calculus and data science would be another strategy
> for getting scientific calculators to share the road, with more relevant
> free tools (always an ulterior motive for me).  I don't think a TI is able
> to do definite integration over a standard normal curve.
>
> Actually, I see I'm wrong:
> http://cfcc.edu/faculty/cmoore/TINormal.htm
>
> Oh well, back to the drawing board.  I still think a strong tie-in twixt
> calc and data science makes a lot of sense at the high school level. With
> or without Jupyter Notebooks.
>
> Kirby
>
> PS:  right now I'm going through Allen Downey's tutorial on Bayesian stats
> using the above mentioned tools, from Pycon 2016:
> https://youtu.be/TpgiFIGXcT4
> I attended this conference, but didn't manage to make this tutorial.
>
> [1]  I've shared this before, still relevant:
> https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/is-code-school-the-
> new-high-school-30a8874170b
>
> Also this blog post:
> http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2018/02/magic-squares.html
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-- 
PerryGrossman2008 at gmail.com
 (617) 383-9061
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