Friday, March 1, 2019

LIMACON 2019 SUNY Old Wesbury!

LIMACON 2019 SUNY Old Wesbury!

If it's March it's gotta be LIMACON, right? Yes! I was invited as a guest speaker once again this year. I've been a speaker at LIMACON every third year since 2001. I've also been an avid attendee since the first LIMACON in 1986. So, welcome to LIMACON 2019, the 33rd annual Long Island MAth CONference at SUNY Old WestBury.

I began my presentation explaining the motivation for my talk. Last summer I was asked to teach Multivariate Calculus MAT225 (see YouTube Playlist above) at a local college the week before the class was to begin! I never taught this course before, I had no text book, I had no SmartBoard and I had no calculators or emulators! However, they did give me a nice multimedia room with a PC podium, PC Projector and 50" HDTVs mirroring the projector all over the room all the way up to the balcony seating! So, I went heavy with my tech background to fill in the missing pieces:

1) To review the material I had not seen since my Electrical Engineering days in the 1980s, I took notes on every lesson I could find on MIT OCW and on YouTube related to Vector Calculus!

2) I ran to my WileyPlus rep who had kindly given me access to electronic versions of the AP Computer Science text I use at my high school to ask for an ebook version of the calculus text we were supposed to be using. There was a bit of a SNAFU at the book store whereby they ordered the wrong book. So, I got Calc III by Deborah Hughes-Hallet on WileyPlus including lots of homework sets, tests and solutions free for the download!

3) In order to emulate a SmartBoard, I brought in my Samsung Chromebook Plus. This Chromebook is one of the first to use Chrome extensions and Droid apps. I primarily used these apps: Screencast-o-matic, Teamviewer and Squid or Handwrite Pro. This Chromebook is just a big tablet with an attached keyboard and trackpad mouse plus an S-Pen. So, I could write notes with the S-Pen and students could see my notes on the PC Projector or HDTVs using the Teamviewer mirroring app and Squid pen app as I recorded for youtube on the screencast-o-matic app!

4) Last, but not least, I used SAGE instead of a graphing calculator in this course. So, the attached keyboard and trackpad mouse came in handy! I encouraged the students to bring in their own tablets and laptops to follow along. In fact, most of my notes became SageNotes rather than SmartNotes. In fact, tests were "open internet!" During a test, I would sit in the balcony where I could see all their laptop screens so I could see that they were only accessing my blog (with sample source code) and SageCell. They could even consult my YouTube Playlist for class if they were inclined, but they really did not have time to do that during a test.

So, the remainder of my presentation revolved around how to use SAGE in class. LIMACON was kind enough to put me in a computer room so my attendees could code along with me (see below). BTW, SAGE is a Computer Algebra System running in the cloud based on the python programming language. SAGE has the look and feel of Mathematica and the functionality of MATLAB plus it's free to use on SageCell. There is a commercial version called CoCalc with some more features available too.


SageNotes



Handouts











YouTube Videos





Well, that's all folks!

A. Jorge Garcia

 

Applied Math, Physics & CompSci
PasteBin SlideShare 
MATH 4H, AP CALC: GC or SAGECELL
CSH: SAGE Server
CSH: Interactive Python
APCSA: c9.io
APCSA: openProcessing

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