[Axiom-math] Re: [Axiom-mail] feedback - AXIOM and undergrad teaching

[Grant Keady]

Tim
The MIT ocw material would seem a reasonable focus ...
so I agree with you. You asked for feedback, so here goes.

A colleague here at University of Western Australia has
AXIOM running on his Debian linux machine, and I've checked it a bit.
And yes, free open source CA obviously has implications for
undergrad teaching, and a few of us in the UWA School of Maths
will probably be putting together a short article (one page intro,
and one page each for GAP, maxima and AXIOM) on open source CA
for the local undergraduate maths magazine "AfterMath".

There are other worthwhile education related projects.
http://maths-physics.org.uk/aiminfo/
http://aiminfo.net
AiM is an open-source "Assessment in Mathematics" system,
depending, however, in current version, totally on Maple.
(It has, the notable advantage over many others in the genre
of being easy to author for, and "it works", even if one
can find style and design criticisms.)
The page there reports under 22nd June 2003:
Chris Sangwin at the University of Birmingham has received a grant to 
rewrite AiM so that it can work with a choice of computer algebra systems, 
including open-source systems.
e-mail: address@hidden
(I have already told Chris that when he has made some progress,
and if I agree with his designs - where currently I favour using JSP
as well as Java servlets akin to those that are already used 
(but will look at what is produced, and make my mind up then)-
I would be interested in helping with a database of questions 
implemented in AXIOM/Aldor.)

Next point. No reason why MIT ocw has to be the only focus for
teaching efforts. In 1996 I gave an
"(Polynomial Algebra) Algorithms of Computer Algebra" course
at Queen Mary College, London. (It had been done in REDUCE
up to 1995, but for good reasons, had to be changed to Maple in
96 and later. Fellow Australians at University of New South
Wales were giving a similar course, and handed on their notes
and question sets which I merged with the QMW materials.)
I'm hoping in 2004 to get a 4th year undergrad to help do an AXIOM
version as part of an undergrad honours project. Follow links
at 
http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/~keady/Teaching/UWAteach/honsProj.html
from which you will get to the LaTeX sources.
If others want to help with AXIOM equivalents of the Maple, and
perhaps tidying the documents, I would be happy.
The UNSW documents were influenced by a proposed (Maple) book by
Kalorkoti, so there would be legal preliminaries in any widespread
distribution. Co-authorship with Kalorkoti, and UNSW and QMW people
for bits they want. ...

Though off-topic, I last looked at my QMW Algorithms
documents in 1999, and, at the time was keen on TechExplorer.
DOES TECHEXPLORER STILL EXIST IN FREE VERSION FOR linux
Netscape or Mozilla? I've failed to find a page to download it
from. (At UWA Maths we would have other uses for on-the-fly
rendering of LaTeX to web-browser, and I'm not sure what we should
use.) ANY ADVICE?

Thanks for reviving AXIOM.
Grant Keady

On Thu, 18 Sep 2003, root 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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> 

-- 
Grant Keady,                           http://www.maths.uwa.edu.au/~keady
School of Mathematics and Statistics,  e-mail:address@hidden
University of Western Australia.      fax   : (+ 61) (8) 9380 1028