Yes, interesting post. It would be great to see calculus taught in Jupyter notebooks. Allen Downey's work is great. I am watching his SciPy 2017 computational stats talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He9MCbs1wgE Also, interesting, Christopher Fonnesbeck - Introduction to Statistical Modeling with Python - PyCon 2017: https://youtu.be/TMmSESkhRtI Perry On Tue, Feb 20, 2018 at 12:00 PM, <edu-sig-request@python.org> wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. if I taught high school calculus today... (kirby urner)

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Message: 1 Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2018 19:50:28 -0800 From: kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> To: "edu-sig@python.org" <edu-sig@python.org> Subject: [Edu-sig] if I taught high school calculus today... Message-ID: <CAPJgG3Q5XVmSsiWafNsq928EiYGKYi7XMmQiBsi4fm9-1_HP4w@mail. gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

I was a high school calculus teacher (also algebra, geometry, trig) first job outta university, stuck with it for two years.

Fast forward to almost age 60, and I'm teaching coding to middle schoolers, thinking it's all still math. [1]

Shouldn't take a "computer scientist" to cover this stuff... Algorithms are algorithms after all.

Were I to teach calculus today, in light of what I now know, I'd focus on probability density functions right when we get to integration, as "area under the probability curve" is precisely how we figure out chances of something happening.

We would use Jupyter Notebooks with SciPy, all free & open source.

As I recall, our calc curriculum never did much to bridge to statistics, but in SciPy / NumPy, every continuous probability distribution function (PDF) comes with a cumulative distribution function (CDF) that's defined exactly as a definite integral between A and B, and giving the probability some x in distribution X falls between A and B.

Forming a bridge twixt calculus and data science would be another strategy for getting scientific calculators to share the road, with more relevant free tools (always an ulterior motive for me). I don't think a TI is able to do definite integration over a standard normal curve.

Actually, I see I'm wrong: http://cfcc.edu/faculty/cmoore/TINormal.htm

Oh well, back to the drawing board. I still think a strong tie-in twixt calc and data science makes a lot of sense at the high school level. With or without Jupyter Notebooks.

Kirby

PS: right now I'm going through Allen Downey's tutorial on Bayesian stats using the above mentioned tools, from Pycon 2016: https://youtu.be/TpgiFIGXcT4 I attended this conference, but didn't manage to make this tutorial.

[1] I've shared this before, still relevant: https://medium.com/@kirbyurner/is-code-school-the- new-high-school-30a8874170b

Also this blog post: http://mybizmo.blogspot.com/2018/02/magic-squares.html