Re: [Maxima-discuss] A question about parsing: ":lisp #$expr$" is not low-level enough

[Jaime V. <vi...@fe...>]

On 14/01/22 22:08, Barton Willis via Maxima-discuss wrote:
> > If (as is the case with many schools) there is a student survey after 
> the classis over, how will students react to questions about the 
> additional material?
>
> *Additional wandering:* For eight years, I served as a department 
> chair for a faculty of about fifteen at a hyphenated public 
> university. As chair, I saw 1000s of student evaluations and comments. 
> Asking students to do anything "unusual" (use TeX,  explain something 
> using two  sentences, or use a programming language in a course on 
> statistics) is a fairly clear path to lower teaching evaluations.  I 
> know this might seem cynical and I know that humans are subject to 
> huge amounts of confirmation bias, but I informally collected this data.
>
> Generally, I do not reveal to students that I sometimes contribute to 
> an open source computer algebra system, and that I donate a bit of my 
> time helping people around the globe to use it. I teach a fairly 
> traditional calculus class.
>
Hello,

My experience using Maxima in my classes has been very different. I do 
tell my students I am a Maxima developer and my results in the student 
surveys got much better since I started using Maxima in my classes. I 
even got a best teacher award out of approximately 300 teachers in our 
College. But I do agree with Richard's and Barton's views in the sense 
that if Maxima is not going to be used in the problems that the students 
solve at the end of each chapter and in the exams, it should not be used.

In the classes I teach, the emphasis is on plotting phase portraits and 
interpreting the behaviour of the system from them. Maxima is used to 
find fixed points, linear approximations, eigenvalues, etc. The 
objective is not to learn how that is done but what can be concluded 
from those results. And my students can use Maxima in their laptops or 
phones during the exams.

How about cheating? They know they are not allowed to use their laptops 
or phones to communicate with others or to try to look at older exams. I 
also discourage cheating by using new problems for every exam. The 
quizzes are made-up of multiple choice questions that I reuse every 
year, but with a Maxima program I change parameters, make several 
different versions and shuffle questions and answers. I also change the 
wording of the questions, because some students have tried to use a 
program in which they would write the initial sentence in a question 
that have been used in previous years, and the program would tell them 
how to solve it.

I have found that the average and good students are very motivated and 
soon realize that being allowed to use Maxima in the exams do not mean 
they do not have to study hard to get a good grade.

Regards,

Jaime