Re: [Maxima-discuss] Feature request: step by step

[Eduardo O. <edu...@gm...>]

May be relevant:

Should Students Learn Integration Rules? - Bruno Buchberger
ACM SIGSAM Bulletin, Volume 24, Issue 1, Pages 10 - 17
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/382276.1095228

  Cheers,
    Eduardo

On Wed, 14 Jan 2026 at 20:09, Brent Meeker <mee...@gm...> wrote:

> Right.  And differential equations is a competency test for calculus.
>
> Brent
>
> On 1/14/2026 12:12 PM, Richard Fateman wrote:
>
> I have a particularly cynical view of required calc courses.
> What would be lost if we just admitted that some percentage of students
> really
> never learned this stuff, but just hired a human tutor or asked an AI bot
> to
> do the homework/ show all work / cheated on exams / got a passing grade?
>
> I suspect passing the required calc course is, in reality, a competency
> test for algebra
> (presumably it is necessary to do algebra for calc...),  and calc per se
> is not needed for,
> say, the lifetime activities of economics majors, should we be asking
> questions about
> what students should be taught?  And how (by youtube??)
>
> (My wife, who studied philosophy in college ... no calc..., yes logic ...,
> retired
> years ago from her job as the director of central computing at UC
> Berkeley. She
> told me at that time  -- "See, I never used *cosine*.")
>
> RJF
>
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 11:57 AM Raymond Toy <toy...@gm...>
> wrote:
>
>> On 1/14/26 11:19 AM, Richard Fateman wrote:
>>
>> If you are expecting Maxima to improve your math skills as in some of the
>> on-line tutoring programs,
>> by some nearly automatic process  (like tracing existing programs), that
>> is highly unlikely to work.
>>
>> Elaborating on Stavros' note -- typically Maxima DOES NOT USE THE STEPS
>> USED BY BEGINNING
>> STUDENTS OF ALGEBRA, CALCULUS, ETC.
>>
>> Exactly.
>>
>> But really, what is the goal of seeing the step-by-step solution? If
>> you're a calc 1 student, would it be useful to know that uses keyhole
>> integration over the complex plane to evaluate some definite integrals? I
>> suppose for motivated students, that would encourage them to learn new
>> math, but I suspect that would basically turn off most students. (Perhaps
>> even worse now when you hear stories about how college students can't do
>> basic arithmetic.)
>>
>> And would this be better done by looking up Youtube videos that explain
>> how to solve interesting problems? I think blackpenredpen is really good
>> for calc 1/2 level math. For more interesting questions, I like Michael
>> Penn. Maths 505 has really interesting integration and diffeq problems.
>> Maxima can't do most of them, I think.
>>
>> There are zillions of math channels on Youtube.
>>
>>
>> 2. There is a mystique of "calculus is hard, uses heuristics, requires
>> intelligence and problem-solving" promoted by
>> teachers, textbooks, etc.
>>
>> Well, I think that's kind of true when it comes to integration. If you
>> watch Maths 505 doing integrals, many of them uses insights that I would
>> not think of doing. Maybe I could, if I spent enough time to thinking about
>> them, but probably not.
>> &#8203;
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