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One has to be a little careful with designing courses like this. They are most likely to be of interest to people who already know, at least to some extent, bot
by fiforpg 2y ago
One has to be a little careful with designing courses like this. They are most likely to be of interest to people who already know, at least to some extent, both (i) calculus and (ii) programming. That is, the (presumable) target audience — those who are learning either of these subjects — is not really ready to take in such a class.
Anecdotally, my personal attempts at incorporating only slightly exotic CASes (Maxima or Sagemath) into calculus courses were met with tepid response at best. Part of the issue was, I believe, that freshmen are rarely interested in setting up software for a non-CS course.
That being said, for slightly higher-level classes it can work quite well as an optional component — I've had really good results with Python projects in an ODE course. Python not being a niche language certainly helped, too.
- dr_kiszonka 2y agoThis is a common challenge in teaching stats where students have to learn statistical concepts and using statistical software simultaneously. In the end, I think it is worth the challenge and beats having students calculate everything by hand & look up values in tables.
- Egrodo 2y agoAs a self taught programmer who never got farther than algebra, this looks awesome to me and I may be that small target audience haha.
- __rito__ 2y ago> "I've had really good results with Python projects in an ODE course." Which textbook did you use for this course? What were the reference material? Could you share with me anything about this course? Lecture notes, code, slides, books, anything.