Diff for "HighSchoolDesign"

What goes wrong in the SAGE notebook interface for secondary school usage

Some of (nice) sage features are not well adapted at an elementary level. In particular:

• the oriented object syntax should sometimes be avoided: the interface must be intuitive from the mathematic *standard* syntax point of vue; on the other side we must keep all python features of list, tuple, dict as they are (ask teachers).
• the algebra under polynoms must be hided a little bit. QQbar, Number fields and symbolic rings must stay in backend;
• the namespace is huge (a general problem of SAGE)
• the help on elementary functions is not well adapted

Supplementary:

• do a french translation of commmands (?)
• write some help files and a really basic tutorial mixing Sage and python.

Solution for polynoms

The high school interface provides two basics functions for creating variables : the var (a symbolic variables for functions) and unknowns (exclusively for polynoms).

sage: a,b,c = var('a,b,c')
sage: X, Y = unknown('X')
(X,Y)
sage: P = a*X^2 + b*X + c

An interactive trigonometric circle

Solution for polynoms

The high school interface provides two basics functions for creating variables : the var (a symbolic variables for functions) and unknowns (exclusively for polynoms).

sage: a,b,c = var('a,b,c')
sage: X, Y = unknown('X')
(X,Y)
sage: P = a*X^2 + b*X + c

Patches

Following the development model of Sage, we will use mercurial patches here.

• Sage patch

• a patch for the documentation will come soon

Program of high school in France

In bracket are the corresponding levels.

• second degree polynom [1e S]
• sequences in particular recursive ones [1e S]
• sequences and approximations : pi, e, sqrt(2), ... [1e S]
• continuity and derivation [Tale S]
• functions study and graphics [Ta1e S]
• integration[Tale S]
• elementary graph theory [Tale ES]

Object or not

The python list usage must be kept as it is. But we have the choice to use or not (explicitely) some methods.

Starting from a list:

python: l = [1,2,3]

We can use the standard append:

python: l.append(4)

or the += concatenation:

python: l += [4]

TODO

There is still a lot of problems:

• clearing the namespace causes some crashes (there are some general memory initialization). I make research to do it properly. For now, I use a "do it, if it works it's good" method.
• sqrt(n) (log(n), exp(n), ...) returns a symbolic expression which does not evaluate correctly as boolean expression.
• help topics in the rest documentation

• latex rendering in plot is not easy to have : sage: text("$" + latex(my_object) + "$", (0,0)). Is there a better way ?

• latex "bug" for rational fractions : http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/9d58693356e11947 and the corresponding (minor) trac ticket http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7363