It was touch and go there for a while. In these tough economic times, we thought the school budget vote would not go well this year. So I was down to one section of AP Calculus BC instead of two and one section of AP Computer Science instead of two – and forget the new course I proposed: Calculus Research Lab (CRL).
But wait, our future at CISTHETA is not so bleak after all! The school budget passed with flying colors, so we’re on! I have my 2 sections of each AP again and we finally got the approval for CRL! Many thanx go to my ChairPerson and Principal for their intervention behind the scenes as well!
Now, I have to do some more research on how my students will do Calculus on ShadowFax, our linux cluster! I would like to spend most of the year having them do projects using Sage and end the year with Octave and R.
SAGE: Software for Algebra and Geometry Exploration (similar to Mathematica) is available at http://www.sagemath.org and http://www.sagenb.org. Octave (similar to MATLAB) is available at http://www.octave.org. R (similar to S-plus) is available at http://www.r-project.org. I found several free texts in pdf format that should be helpful:
http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wdj/teaching/calc1-sage (Differential Calculus with Sage)
http://wdjoyner.com/teach/calc2-sage/hoffman-stein-calculus.pdf (Integral Calculus with Sage)
http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wdj/teaching/DiffyQ/des-book.pdf (Differentail Equations with Sage)
http://www.mathworks.com/moler/index_ncm.html (Numerical Computations with MATLAB)
http://www.mathworks.com/moler/exm/index.html (Experiments with MATLAB)
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Verzani-SimpleR.pdf (SimpleR for Statistics)
Good Luck,
A. Jorge Garcia
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