[Axiom-math] Re: [Axiom-mail] feedback

[Mike Dewar]

Hi Tim,

In addition to the pointers from Grant Keady you might want to check out
the following:

- Algebra Interactive! A first year undergraduate algebra course which
  has been taught at Eindhoven for several years based on an interactive
  book published by Springer and "powered" by Gap.  See
  http://www.win.tue.nl/~ida/home.html .

- Mika Seppala's work at Helsinki and Florida on multilingual calculus
  courses http://web.math.fsu.edu/~seppala/HLS/ .

- The MapleTA (TA=Teaching Assistant) product and resources
  http://www.maplesoft.com/mapleta/ .

You should also check out the "computer algebra in education" sessions
that seem to be part of most ACA meetings.

Cheers, Mike.

On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 09:31:34PM -0400, Tim Daly wrote:
> *,
> 
> MIT has a lot of courses online. In particular, it has a fair number
> of math and science courses online. (http://ocw.mit.edu)
> 
> The discussion at work today (I'm at City College of NY) is a proposal
> to develop a common-format targeted front-end to Axiom which would
> match and support the MIT math and science online courses. Of course
> we don't have the man-power or expertise to develop such a large range
> of courses in-house. Nevertheless, I think the idea has a lot of merit
> for the education community and, in particular, the Axiom community.
> 
> Clearly the MIT math courses are reasonable for implementation in
> Axiom (for example, Strang's Linear Algebra). And the Linear Algebra
> course is clearly the basis for the Mechanical Engineering
> course. Both of these are probably well addressed by the 3 Ms
> (Mathematica, Maple, Matlab).  I don't believe, however, that there is
> a coordinated body of code for the range of available courses in any
> of these systems although pieces exist for some of them.  Axiom is in
> a "come from behind" position at the moment.
> 
> I believe that Axiom's new open source nature gives it a major
> advantage over the 3Ms since both professors and students can read,
> modify, and create new algebra which could be freely shared worldwide.
> Since we're trying to get Axiom shipped with all of the available
> operating systems (Linux, Windows, Macs, etc.) it will be available on
> all university and student desktops worldwide. This will give Axiom a
> common foothold in the education market.  A common front-end approach
> would lower the learning curve for students so less class time would
> be spent teaching students to use a computer algebra system.  A
> connection to the online courseware would make it very useful.  And it
> would give widely available tutorials for Axiom so everyone benefits.
> 
> Is it reasonable for an amorphous, worldwide community to try to do
> coordinated development of software around a single MIT target? Would it
> be reasonable to convince, or hope to convince, MIT to host the same
> courses in multiple languages? Could we figure out a way to develop a
> grant/subgrant structure that would attract developers for particular
> courses? Is it possible that any granting organization would fund
> developers worldwide? Is it politically possible within Universities
> to expect that MIT's presentation of Linear Algebra would supercede
> locally developed courses? If not, is it reasonable to design the
> software to allow selective order of topic introduction? Can we design
> courseware that would handle, say, the top 10 selling Linear Algebra
> books? Will professors allow students to use Axiom on tests (my math
> professors would not let us bring calculators to class, including my
> Advanced Calculus class :-) ). Can we arrange the issues and try to
> address each of them in some coordinated fashion?
> 
> It is clear that free and open source development can have as large
> an impact on education as Linux has had on the operating system area
> if we can build a community around the effort. One of the major issues
> is that building software gets little or no academic credit and even
> less grant funding. Perhaps a coordinated effort can change both of
> these mindsets.
> 
> If you have a few minutes I'd like some feedback on this idea.
> Please reply on the address@hidden mailing list.
> 
> Tim Daly
> address@hidden
> address@hidden
> 
> 
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