Emacs, eev, and Maxima - now!
Eduardo Ochs - IRC: edrx, http://anggtwu.net/, @eduardoochs on Telegram, eduardoochs@gmail.com
The following image shows where the talk is in the schedule for Sat 2024-12-07. Solid lines show talks with Q&A via BigBlueButton. Dashed lines show talks with Q&A via IRC or Etherpad.
Format: 20-min talk; Q&A: Etherpad https://pad.emacsconf.org/2024-maxima
Discuss on IRC: #emacsconf
Status: Waiting for video from speaker
Saturday, Dec 7 2024, ~9:30 AM - 9:50 AM MST (US/Mountain)
Saturday, Dec 7 2024, ~8:30 AM - 8:50 AM PST (US/Pacific)
Saturday, Dec 7 2024, ~4:30 PM - 4:50 PM UTC
Saturday, Dec 7 2024, ~5:30 PM - 5:50 PM CET (Europe/Paris)
Saturday, Dec 7 2024, ~6:30 PM - 6:50 PM EET (Europe/Athens)
Saturday, Dec 7 2024, ~10:00 PM - 10:20 PM IST (Asia/Kolkata)
Sunday, Dec 8 2024, ~12:30 AM - 12:50 AM +08 (Asia/Singapore)
Sunday, Dec 8 2024, ~1:30 AM - 1:50 AM JST (Asia/Tokyo)
Description
I teach Calculus in a bad campus of a good federal univeral in Brazil. The main campus of that university is located in a big city and has lots of resources, and I work in a small campus, that is in a small city, and that has few resources - and we get the students that don't get enough points in the entrance exams to go to better places. In this presentation I will show how I've been teaching Maxima, and Emacs, and eev, to my students.
With very few exceptions my students are "beginners" in a sense that is inconceivable in developed countries - they're not people for whom things like spreadsheets, Jupyter Notebooks, and VSCode are "intuitive"... most of them have never seen a terminal in their lives, and many of them have so little familiarity with computers that they don't know, for example, that keyboards have a key called F8.
It turns out that if we define "beginners" in the right way - hint: not by statistics! - then we can find a way to present Maxima, and then Emacs and eev, that makes all sense to the "beginners" in my classes, and that approach lets them install everything and become (sort of) autonomous very quickly. A few students were able to install everything - WSL, Debian, Emacs, eev, Maxima - and run the examples in about one hour; most others took between one hour and two hours, and some others had to plonked.
http://anggtwu.net/ORG/emacsconf2024.org.html
About the speaker:
Eduardo is the author of an Emacs package called eev, that is a way of creating "executable notes" that apparently makes very little sense to people in developed countries. In this talk he will show how he has been using Emacs and eev to teach Maxima to his students in Brazil, who - with few exceptions - have very little experience with computers, and who are not the kind of "beginners" for whom programs like spreadsheets and VSCode are "intuitive".
Questions or comments? Please e-mail eduardoochs@gmail.com