RE: Teaching Using Octave

[Harbinson, Jeremy]

 When I have to introduce a student to Matlab (I use Octave on principle
- the University installs Matlab - on principle) I usually just get them
to 'Google' (horrible word, but convenient) for something like
'introduction matlab' - there are lots of web sites, mainly at US
Universities, with introductions to Matlab (and sometimes Octave is
explicitly referred to) and its use in computational physics etc. The
student can then find the one that suits their level of knowledge of
scritping, sums, or whatever.
Jeremy

-----Original Message-----
From: Y U Sasidhar [mailto:address@hidden 
Sent: donderdag 14 april 2005 13:39
To: Victor Munoz
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Teaching Using Octave

Victor Munoz wrote:


> 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,
> 
 From whatever I could make out from the contents, you are discussing
numerical methods too and introduced programmimg principles using c++.
I think that for a first programming introduction octave is great; I
would use that ( used also ) to intoduce loops etc.
THerefore I feel numerical principles plus octave plus basic unix will
be a good combination for a text. Most of it is there in your book
except that your book uses c++ to introduce programming.
regards,

--
  Sasidhar




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-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
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