[ale] graphing calculator

drifter drifter at oppositelock.org
Fri Dec 4 21:51:01 EST 2009


My brother is sharp enough to have risen from Seaman to Sr. Chief P.O. and 
be assigned the task of fleet navigator. Taught himself spherical trig.
Me: I opened the textbook and read the first statement -- The sum of the 
angles of a triangle is greater than 180 degrees -- and closed the book.
But his computer skills are nearly non-existent.  He has an older WinXP box
and is simply not able to handle the complexities of maintaining a Linux 
box and downloading/compiling software. So the only software he can use 
must run on a Winbloze box and install itself with no more than a mouse 
click or two.
That said, this group has provided him with several possibilities and I 
have forwarded them along to him. 

We are grateful.

Sean

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On Friday 04 December 2009 20:06:27 Jim Kinney wrote:
> check out the various offerings of open source text books as well!!
> http://knowledgeforge.net/opentextbook/svn/
> 
> Plus all the courseware from MIT.
> 
> For generating high quality graphs gnuplot is great. A tad cryptic in
>  places but you can choose the output format as well as all the input
>  methods. I have yet to play with sage (suggested by another ALE'er!)
>  but it looks to be very promising and comparable with the basic feature
>  set of Mathematica.
> 
> Most math textbooks are pretty pictures and abysmal content. Especially
>  in the K12 arena. very sad. Your brother is on a very noble mission!
> 
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 1:28 PM, drifter <drifter at oppositelock.org> wrote:
> > Gentle folk,
> > my brother needs your help.
> > He is retired navigator for the USN. Now tutoring kids in math in
> > New Bern, NC, and finds the textbooks (middle school/high school)
> > the kids are forced to use just about impossible.  From his point of
> > view he is amazed they can learn any algebra/geometry/trig at all.
> >
> > So he is struggling to write his own textbook he can give to the teens
> > he is working with.  To that end he needs an app (windoze, cough,
> > cough) that will allow him to input an algebraic equation and get out
> > a graph in a file format (jpg, etc) that he can then import into the
> > Open Office file he is creating.
> >
> > I will take credit on weaning him away from Office. :)
> >
> > Any thoughts?
> >
> > Sean
> >
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> 


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