Do the math: too much calculus? (2012)

Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by euroclydon on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @03:24PM (#12746890)

I have a 5th and a 6th grader. I'm going to buy them an educational copy of Maple soon, so they can have a beautiful platform to plot 2-D and 3-D graphs, solve equations, do derivatives and integrals, and factor algebraic expressions.

I want them to do all this in high school, whether or not they take Calculus, so they can get an intuition for it. Then they can memorize the trig rules in college.

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Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by ivan_ah on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @11:48PM (#12749625)

You should also consider SymPy, available as a webapp http://live.sympy.org/ or in jupyter notebook form.

Plotting function graphs is a bit harder (matplotlib) but overall I find SymPy to be much more logical and easy to grok than Maple's weird syntax. Here is a short tutorial on how to do basic math using SymPy: https://minireference.com/static/tutorials/sympy_tutorial.pd...

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Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by euroclydon on Thursday October 20, 2016 @10:16AM (#12752327)

I love Jupyter. I set up pydot in a notebook, and made high level functions to create and print trees and graphs. My 10 yr old picked it up quickly while we killed time at his brother's swim meet.

But, I'd love for them to learn to use a CAS engine. I appreciated, in college, being able to quickly factor a polynomial, solve an equation, and find derivatives.

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Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by ivan_ah on Thursday October 20, 2016 @12:12PM (#12753609)

> But, I'd love for them to learn to use a CAS engine

SymPy is the best CAS I know of. You can use the methods like expand, factor, collect, and solve on any expression.

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Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by Oletros on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @03:57PM (#12747159)

AS an Spanish not knowing the US education system, at what age one kid goes to 5th grade?

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Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by euroclydon on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @04:02PM (#12747204)

My 5th grader is currently 10 years old.

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Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by colechristensen on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @09:34PM (#12749269)

The median age in 1st grade is 6.

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Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by Oletros on Thursday October 20, 2016 @07:53AM (#12751520)

Thanks to both of you

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Re:Do the math: too much calculus? (2012) by pdm55 on Thursday October 20, 2016 @09:11AM (#12751863)

Have you tried Geogebra?

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