Re: Mathematica skill level snippet(s)
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg104685] Re: Mathematica skill level snippet(s)
- From: "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma at 12000.org>
- Date: Sat, 7 Nov 2009 06:45:29 -0500 (EST)
- References: <hd0t9u$82o$1@smc.vnet.net>
"Virgil Stokes" <vs at it.uu.se> wrote in message news:hd0t9u$82o$1 at smc.vnet.net... >I am a teacher and am often faced with the problem of how to determine > the programming skill level for some of my students (3rd year > undergraduates in Engineering and Physics). Knowledge of their skills in > Mathematica can be very important for the design of student projects > that require Mathematica. > > I would appreciate suggestions for small segments of Mathematica code > (or perhaps a single segment of increasing complexity) that could be > used to at least get an idea of their skills in Mathematica. You can > assume they would be using Mathematica 7. > > All suggestions, examples, comments, etc. will be welcomed :-) > > --V. Stokes > I took a computational physics course at UCI (univ. of California, Irvine) where we used Mathematica for everything. The exams, homeworks, quizzes, everything was done using Mathematica. I noticed many students had a hard time at the start since many did not know Mathematica at all. But I think by the end of the course, most did well. I also struggled in this course, but more from the physics part, not the programming part, but that also to some extent ;) I think if the students do not know any Mathematica, it would be a bit hard, so may be you need to spend 2 weeks just on introducting mathematica before anything the actual course starts. Here is link to the course if you are interested to see the level of difficultly. Here you see examples of problems we had to solve in Mathemtica. May be you can use the first few homeworks as examples? http://tinyurl.com/yf4snwd --Nasser