Re: Using Octave for class labs

[fork]

John B. Thoo <jthoo <at> yccd.edu> writes:

> 
> If you think so, then I will tell the students to obtain Octave 
> in the winter break
> (before the semester starts) and I will work on them myself
>  during the break.

The tricky part might be in the "obtaining" -- Octave is still a little
difficult to get running if you aren't a mildly sophisticated user, especially
on Windows.  If you could help them install it on their laptops, and maybe
provide a backup for them to use in a student lab, that might head off some
difficulty in getting off the ground.  

Though I guess 3.2.4 has an installer and would be enough for a beginning class,
easily -- just test that part of the process, maybe ask students to install it
and run it now, just to see how it goes.

Also, the students might not be used to working from a command line, which is
easy to teach, but might require a tutorial ("How do I find an m-file in a
directory?  How do I run it?  How do I see all my m-files? How do I find my
current directory?  How do I find data I save?")  But maybe they just enter
stuff and look at the answers on the screen, in which case understanding the
command line environment  may not be so important.

As far a first course linear algebra *math*, Octave should do just fine.