undergraduate physics materials

[T. Bensky]

Hi all---I will be trying to use cloud.sagemath.com in my undergraduate physics course this term. I've prepared a few materials. I am sharing them here in case others are interested, or might find them useful.

1) Quick youtube video tutorials on the basics:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb9aKR__L9t91URBOP-fjE4dEa4tIiJTJ

2) Here is my first assignment for the students in the computer lab:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17f3FUBgb_-Ju2EctyS5P5XQXKAIIwXt6Wl-7q2kwa50/edit?usp=sharing

3) I'm working on a tutorial of things an undergraduate might want to know (basic number crunching, plotting, defining functions and some symbolic math). My start is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SxdiFzopt17AetvSvrQS9ktbvIvKr88HDKXXaaHfy6s/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks,
Tom B.

[William Stein]

Very nice -- I watched them all and posted them to my G+ feed. Thanks!

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--
William Stein
Professor of Mathematics
University of Washington
http://wstein.org

[T. Bensky]

Hi all--

As per my posting below, I just ran a class session where 36 students in an undergraduate physics class logged onto cloud.sagemath.com to do some initial

exercises.  It basically worked OK, and I'm super excited about having math in the cloud, as undergrads just aren't that good at installing and configuring software.

In my class (a high-tech "studio" classroom), some connected via the hard-wired computers in the lab, others brought their laptops and connected via the campus wireless. Here's what I noticed (in no particular order):

* Using _ for "last result" was a bit flakey...they like this because it's like the "ans" symbol on their calculators.  On one student's computer, typing _ returned 20 no matter what the "last result" was.

* Some experienced long delays (minutes) when attempting to make a new project, then start a worksheet.  The little animated progress wheel would just sit there.  A page-refresh followed by a re-login seemed to work.

* A similar symptom occurred that also occurred when I ran a version of sagemath I installed on my own server (not the cloud version)..a couple of years ago. This was that simply nothing would happen when shift-enter was pressed. Even for something like

2+2 [shift]-[enter]

or

A=4

A

There would simply be no output.

* The students are very tempted to use 5*10^3 for scientific notation, not 5e3.

* The students are very excited to ignore my simple instructions and go off and do some

symbolic math. They all love to see integrals and derivatives done for them. 

* inserting * in terms like 5x (needs to be 5*x) was a continual problems.

* I wonder if the worksheet could have a "student" mode that set up a bunch of things to make sage work more with what undergrads might expect. Things like:

1) auto declare a-z to be variables, like var('a,b,c,d,e......z') could be done as the worksheet starts. Also, put an assume(a..z) > 0 for them so integration works more often.

2) Suppress those nasty red error messages. Undergrads just forget to balance ( and ), etc. It would be better to say "something is wrong with your expression" or "( 

and ) need to balance" instead of all of that red, intimidating text.

3) other things to tip sage into working "the way an intro student might expect."

* I believe the students see computer use as an unnecessary diversion. I gave them an intro. about how scientists don't really use calculators anymore, and how much nicer the computer is vs. the TI83, etc. but every time I do a computer activity like this with undergrads, I get this odd feeling of ire from them, like it would have been even better if I just let them out early or did another homework problem, etc.  I think we've (those of us in higher-ed) have all done a bad job at convincing students of the value the computer has in solving problems...they just don't see it as a tool for doing such.  

* I have plans to use cloud.sagemath about 3 more times this term do to some math as it comes up in my class (undergraduate E&M in a physics dept).  I'll report back on how these sessions went.

Thanks, hope other find this experience useful.

Tom B.

[Harald Schilly]

Hi, thanks for the experience, although this is maybe better off in
the slightly related "sage-edu" mailing list than here, but anyways.
Teaching a class is certainly a core feature SMC should support.

I've also some experience in working with students, teaching Linux,
etc. My impression is, that there is either a clear understanding that
computers & software are a very powerful combination that need a lot
of work to get used to and make it useful -- or a complete lack of
that insight. I assume that has to do with how good user interface
have become and also, that a few help a lot of others to cope with
their computer problems.

I don't know if there is a good solution or how education could tackle
that problem. Your comments indicate to me, that there is lack of
deeper understanding and maybe more diverse examples are necessary to
"expand the narrow mind".

* linux terminal: basic terminal commands; create a bash script with a
for loop; etc.
* and after these low-level exercises step up to the higher level
where the notebook sits (which is essentially also a form of such a
REPL interface)
* finally, write a short python program, which reads some data from a
file and does some computations (sums in a CSV file)

> * Using _ for "last result" was a bit flakey...

I wouldn't suggest using that, it's better to make things explicit.
I.e. they need to have a mental model, what a variable is and how they
work.

> There would simply be no output.

In the settings, the restart worksheet server could be helpful. The
components of the SMC system are also not running as smooth as they
could. Massive expansion of server resources and tweaking/bugfixing
will hopefully reduce that problem significantly.

> * The students are very excited to ignore my simple instructions and go off
> and do some
> symbolic math. They all love to see integrals and derivatives done for them.

Although I wrote about that more formal introduction above, I think
it's important to just let them play around. They cannot destroy
anything and testing the limits of anything new is always exiting.
Just don't forget to show them the different types of plots, like
matrix_plot, implicit_plot and complex_plot.

>
> * inserting * in terms like 5x (needs to be 5*x) was a continual problems.

AFAIK there are "half-half" solutions - but in my eyes, it's better to
have that inconvenience for the long term. Scientific computing
implies some programming ... and there this level of explicitly is
almost always the case.

> 1) auto declare a-z to be variables, like var('a,b,c,d,e......z') could be
> done as the worksheet starts.

I'm for x,y and z, but e.g. "r" is a really bad idea. If you would sit
in an undergrad course for statistics, that's the "R" software ;)

Said that, there is a pretty good default declaration mode for SymPy.
I think they have nice defaults and that might fit your needs more?

i.e.
"""
from __future__ import division
import sympy as sym
from sympy import *
x, y, z = symbols("x y z")
k, m, n = symbols("k m n", integer=True)
f, g, h = map(Function, 'fgh')
"""

and then

http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/raw.github.com/jrjohansson/scientific-python-lectures/master/Lecture-5-Sympy.ipynb

It's maybe super confusing to start off with something completely
different ... OTOH maybe it's also even more fun to compare two
systems head to head since they work slightly differently and offer
even more to explore and play around.

>
> 2) Suppress those nasty red error messages.

Treating syntax and semantic errors differently, well, that could be
useful for everyone. Yes.

> * I believe the students see computer use as an unnecessary diversion. I
> gave them an intro. about how scientists don't really use calculators
> anymore, and how much nicer the computer is vs. the TI83, etc. but every
> time I do a computer activity like this with undergrads, I get this odd
> feeling of ire from them, like it would have been even better if I just let
> them out early or did another homework problem, etc. I think we've (those
> of us in higher-ed) have all done a bad job at convincing students of the
> value the computer has in solving problems...they just don't see it as a
> tool for doing such.

Maybe you have to show them examples which are way too complicated,
but on the other hand they immediately understand it, because it's
more tangible?
E.g. a plot of a FFT of a sound wave, or a statistical analysis of
some data round them? I don't know ...
What I mean is that a simple list of low level building blocks is not
convincing enough. The true power comes with the combination of many
smaller tools and that's where there real interest starts. Teaching
this is a hard task, yes ;)

> I'll
> report back on how these sessions went.
>
> Thanks, hope other find this experience useful.

Thanks again, and in any case, please let us know what happens. Most
of your problems are a bit out of scope and much broader, but I am
sure there are others who are also interested!

Harald

[T. Bensky]

Harald---thanks for the replies.

Tom B.

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Tom,

Thanks for your reports. 5x versus 5*x is a perpetual discussion and there is
always interest in a "beginner's mode." As Harald suggests, the sage-edu Google
group is a good place to find more discussion.

You might also think about coming to one of our "Sage Edu Days" workshops
(lately, in June in Seattle, and scheduled for June 2014 already). Watch the
worshop pages on the Sage wiki for updates. I think you would find a lot of
folks with commn interests and your work in physics classes would be of interest
to many of us.

Rob

[T. Bensky]

Hi all-I have been reading this group and apparently there have been hardware upgrades, adding capacity to the cloud.sagemath system.

I have definitely noticed it. I am using cloud.sagemath in a classroom of 36 students (undergraduate physics), and cloud.sagemath has been nice and fast...very zippy. Results are coming right back at us.  It's great!

Tom B.

[William Stein]

On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 6:32 PM, T. Bensky <tbe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all-I have been reading this group and apparently there have been
> hardware upgrades, adding capacity to the cloud.sagemath system.

$45K of hardware and a lot of hard work by me and Keith Clawson moving
computers around, cabling, installing linux, setting things up,
rewriting software to be more scalable, etc... I'm working on more
scalability software improvements today, which should further help.

> I have definitely noticed it. I am using cloud.sagemath in a classroom of 36
> students (undergraduate physics), and cloud.sagemath has been nice and
> fast...very zippy. Results are coming right back at us. It's great!

Did you literally have all 36 using the site at once and had this
great experience? I'm curious, because I've ran many computer labs
using sagenb.org (and similar servers I've set up over the years) with
up to about 20-ish students, and it's never really fully robustly
worked. I don't have an appropriate class this quarter in which to
run this experiment.

I can see usage stats by watching the servers. However, it is a
totally different thing to actually stand in a computer lab with 30+
students, and all have them using a compute heavy site successfully at
once. cloud.sagemath is very challenging to scale compared to some
websites because of the persistent sessions and heavy number crunching
that people can easily initiate.

-- William

>
> Tom B.
>
>
> On Friday, September 27, 2013 8:52:31 AM UTC-7, T. Bensky wrote:
>>
>> Hi all---I will be trying to use cloud.sagemath.com in my undergraduate
>> physics course this term. I've prepared a few materials. I am sharing them
>> here in case others are interested, or might find them useful.
>>
>> 1) Quick youtube video tutorials on the basics:
>> http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLb9aKR__L9t91URBOP-fjE4dEa4tIiJTJ
>>
>> 2) Here is my first assignment for the students in the computer lab:
>>
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/17f3FUBgb_-Ju2EctyS5P5XQXKAIIwXt6Wl-7q2kwa50/edit?usp=sharing
>>
>> 3) I'm working on a tutorial of things an undergraduate might want to
>> know (basic number crunching, plotting, defining functions and some symbolic
>> math). My start is here:
>>
>>
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SxdiFzopt17AetvSvrQS9ktbvIvKr88HDKXXaaHfy6s/edit?usp=sharing
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Tom B.
>

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[T. Bensky]

In my class, we probably had 20 active connections to cloud.sagemath at a time for about one hour. Students were 

hitting it with some symbolic integration and some function definitions and evaluations. All results came back very quickly.

Tom B.