MathPiper class final thoughts.
Ted Kosan
the past five weeks and I hope at least some of you learned some new
things too :-)
Ever since I started the MathPiper project in 2008, I have been trying
to figure out who to "market" MathPiper too when the time comes to
officially release it. One possibility is to advertise MathPiper
directly to students and another possibility is to advertise it to
mathematics teachers.
The GeoGebra project seems to mostly focus on meeting the needs of
mathematics teachers and therefore it provides an example of what
taking this route with MathPiper may be like.
Khan Academy, on the other hand, appears to mostly bypass mathematics
teachers by teaching students directly. The explosive growth of Khan
Academy (and other similar efforts) has me wondering how widespread
this "teaching students directly" approach is going to become over the
next 10 years?
The official release of MathPiper is still at least a year away so
perhaps between now and then it will become clearer which of these two
routes would be better to take for MathPiper.
In the meantime, the following changes are being planned for MathPiper:
1) Further syntax changes to make the language more suitable for
beginning programmers.
2) Enhancements to the error reporting system so that it provides more
helpful explanations for what might have caused a given error.
3) The ability to show all of the steps needed to solve a problem.
4) More complete documentation.
If anyone is interested in using MathPiper in the future, feel free to
join the MathPiper User group:
http://groups.google.com/group/mathpiper-user
Ted