Re: Role of CAS in education: was Re: Historical CAS question

mike_sh_at_nospam
Date: 01/29/05 

Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2005 04:21:56 GMT

carlos@colorado.edu wrote:

>
> I teach graduate courses in engineering using CAS for assignment and
> application examples. Students are supposed to learn those on their own
> time. Same as with other software tool. In my experience it takes only
> a few hours for them to learn all they need.

Well, this is like saying it takes only few hours
to learn chess.

There is a truth to this, if what you mean by
learning it is knowing the move rules and how
each piece move.

But there is a big difference between knowing the
basic rules and being able to play a good game of chess
and to be able to understand the game.

This is the same for any programming language as well.
For me, learning a CAS system is not much different
than learning a new programming language.

Sure, you can learn say C++ or Java in few hours. But
do you really think someone will be able to produce
any useful program in them after only few hours
of learning? If so, then why do you see job ads
asking for 5 or 10 YEARS experience in these languages.

Learning a CAS system and becoming good enough in it to
be able to be productive and use it as a useful tool
takes much more time than few hours. It is a investment
in time, but it is a good investment. The more
time students spend using it, the more useful to them
a CAS becomes.

So, saying it takes only few hours (even though you
qualified this by saying 'to learn all they need')
shows exactly the problem. Schools still do not
understand that these systems are really complicated
systems and students need more time to become familiar
with them.

  In essence they use a CAS
> as a glorified calculator.
>
> Spending time in class on that subject would be off topic. And that is
> true of any utility: teaching a course in dental hygiene should not
> involve lectures on the fabrication of toothbrushes.
>
> In the Applied Math department they do use CAS at a somewhat deeper
> level. They offer 1-hr-a-week service labs for students wishing to be
> guided to deeper waters in matlab, mathematica, etc. Labs are taught
> by graduate students or postdocs. There are no courses devoted to CAS I
> am aware of in the entire university - the market would be extremely
> small.
>

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