Sage Cloud in my Programming Languages course

[Eric Manley]

I wanted to say thanks for installing those compilers I asked about a few weeks ago. I'm using Sage Cloud in my Programming Languages course, and I have one big project with all 34 students on it. I tested out a teaching idea this week where the entire class collectively writes some code to solve an exercise problem (after first working it out in small groups), and it worked really well. I could say things like "OK, what do we do next" and then I could have a student type something in while the whole class watches, and then another student could fix something from the first student's code, etc. The students thought it was pretty cool, and I did too. I'm really looking forward to using this the rest of the semester.

Thanks for making this system available!

Eric Manley
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Drake University
Des Moines, IA

[Harald Schilly]

Wow, that sounds great ;-)

Can you elaborate a bit what this was about? Which programming
language? It's really interesting to learn how SMC is used, especially
for teaching.

Harald

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "sage-cloud" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to sage-cloud+...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-cloud/c9e4c1a3-8ade-4adb-8c96-836c0ecbf742%40googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Eric Manley]

This was the first week, so the content wasn't very exciting. I'm introducing Perl with some short exercises like a "guess my number" game and talking about dynamic typing. Later in the semester, we're going to do an interpreter in ML as well as some Prolog stuff.

Most of the time that I do group programming work in class, we finish the exercise with a solution on the projector. I ask different groups to tell me what to type and we get the final thing working all together. I see SMC being a really nice way to get students more involved in that part.