Re: Teaching Using Octave

[Victor Munoz]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 12:32:28PM +0530, Y U Sasidhar wrote:
> I have used octave in teaching. The problem I had was that
> the students have absolutely no previous exposure to
> computers and are not in a position to use a manual.
> There was no "text" on octave, so I had to use an elementary
> matlab based book. A good text showing the use of octave in
> engineering and science context will go a long way in
> consolidating octave's use as a teaching tool. Octave is
> great for those who know their way around; but for beginning
>  students a good text is required.
> 


I don't know if this is going to help or not. 

A colleague and I have made a course for physics students, where we teach
them several tools (TeX, Octave, C++, bash programming), and then we expect
them to work on numerical problems in mathematics and physics (mainly solve
differential equations, but we've also had them play with chaotic maps,
cellular automata, etc.). We wrote a book for the course, and I wrote the
Octave chapter. Bad news: it is in Spanish. Besides, we don't regard the
book as "finished", as we consider revisions everytime we make the
course again. 

If someone wants to take a look at it, it's at

http://aristoteles.ciencias.uchile.cl/homepage/cursos/mfm0/mfm0.pdf

The Octave chapter is number 4. If someone thinks it would be interesting to
have something like that available in English, we could work on translate
it, unless there's an interested soul out there. The Octave chapter is very
simple, only to introduce basic functionality and capability --later in the
course (and in the book), we propose numerical problems which the students
attack with the tools learned so far-- but maybe it can help as a first
reference.

Regards,

                                        Victor
                                        





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