commit 1c708d25453056e01ae10d85f302ac8486289bba
parent d6c61d988bfa4255baf9cdae42db59ebee38363f
Author: Sebastiano Tronto <sebastiano.tronto@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 26 May 2021 10:24:50 +0200
More info on the course
Diffstat:
| M | README.md | | | 119 | ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------- |
1 file changed, 100 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-)
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
@@ -15,8 +15,6 @@ understanding of these tools and can use them whenever needed, such as if they
need to write a Thesis, prepare slides for a presentation or carry out
intense computations.
-### LaTeX
-
LaTeX is a markup language to write and format documents of any type. It is
particularly well-suited for scientific documents, but it can be used for any
type of document, including books, CVs and even presentation slides.
@@ -30,8 +28,6 @@ visually changing the appearence of the text, the "compiler" will always try to
produce an output that is faithful to what the user indicated, so the user does
not have to manually adjust the result after every major modification.
-### SageMath
-
SageMath is a free and open-source mathematical software system which builds
on top of many existing ones: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Pari/GP, GAP, R
and many more. Thanks to it, all the features all these languages can be
@@ -43,8 +39,9 @@ computations.
## Videos
For the first few lectures I have filmed some videos which are a shorter
-version of what explained in class. You can find all of them in [this YouTube
-channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPWzPfoW5UJInqZcqGCigg).
+version of what explained in class. You can find all of them in
+[this YouTube channel]
+(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPWzPfoW5UJInqZcqGCigg).
* [Getting started with LaTeX](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVvQpZEeIDI)
* [LaTeX bibliography](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KrNY7BXdPo)
@@ -58,21 +55,105 @@ channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUPWzPfoW5UJInqZcqGCigg).
The files in this repository are organized as follows:
* `Lectures` contains the slides and notes I have made and used during the
- lectures. Some of them are classic (Beamer) slides, some other are
- [Jupyter Notebook](https://jupyter.org/) files.
+ lectures. Some of them are classic (Beamer) slides, some other are
+ [Jupyter Notebook](https://jupyter.org/) files. Each notebook file has
+ also been converted to pdf.
* `Homework` contains the four homework assignment given during the course.
- They accounted for 100% of the final grade.
-* `Resources` contains some random files (tutorials, reference manual) that I
- have found online. All credits go to the original authors.
+ They accounted for 100% of the final grade.
+* `Resources` contains some random links and files (tutorials, reference
+ manual) that I have found online. All credits go to the original authors.
* `src` contains the LaTeX and (and Sage) source code for the files in the
- `Lectures` and `Homework` folders, as well as some "scratchpad" LaTeX file
- written during the lectures as a live example.
+ `Lectures` and `Homework` folders, as well as some "scratchpad" LaTeX file
+ written during the lectures as a live example.
## Teaching
-INS guidelines for teachers who want to do something similar (including how long
-each lecture was etc.)
-
-INS also stuff about license (use my personal email address instead of unilu)
-
-INS also list of topics for each lecture (take from moodle)
+If you want to teach a course on the same or similar topic, feel free to use,
+modify, adapt and share, as a whole or in part, the material you find in this
+repository.
+Technically the license is Creative Commons Attribution (see `LICENSE`), so
+you should mention where you got this from: a link to this git repository at
+the beginning of the course is enough.
+
+Moreover, you should remove or replace the university logo and my email
+address, which you can replace with your own or with my personal address
+`sebastiano [dot] tronto [at] gmail [dot] com`.
+
+Below you can find some details on how the course was taught.
+
+### Lecture mode, duration and frequency
+
+The lectures were given in remote format, except for the last one which was
+given in a classroom with some of the students following it remotely.
+
+For lectures with slides I would switch to a LaTeX editor or Python console
+every time I introduced a new feature, so that I could immediately show
+it in practice.
+For lectures with Jupyter notes I would simply follow them on a Jupyter
+notebook, modifying the example and solving the exercises as I went through
+them.
+
+The lectures were 3 hours and 30 minutes long (four 45 minute units + 30
+minutes for breaks) and they were given roughly once every two weeks, with
+some exceptions. This heavily influenced the distribution of the topics in
+some cases: for example, the first and second lectures were 3 weeks apart,
+so I decided to give a very broad overview of the main features of LaTeX on
+the first lecture, saving the technical details for lecture 2, so that the
+students could start using it immediately. With a different schedule I would
+have probably taken a different approach.
+
+### Content
+
+The content of each lecture was as follows:
+
+* **Lecture 1 (slides 1 and 2):** introduction to the course,
+ LaTeX fundamentals.
+* **Lecture 2 (slides 3):** more technical details on LaTeX; defining commands,
+ using counters (e.g. for theorem numbering) and basic bibliography with
+ Bibtex.
+* **Lecture 3 (slides 4 and 5):** graphics with TikZ and presentations with
+ Beamer.
+* **Lecture 4 (slides 6):** a "practical" introduction to Python; in this
+ lecture I assumed that the students did not know even the basics of
+ programming and I introduced Python mainly as an interactive language,
+ explaining the most common programming structures (conditional statements,
+ loops, functions) only towards the end.
+* **Lecture 5 (notebook 7):** introduction to SageMath, algebra and some
+ cryptography.
+* **Lecture 5 (notebooks 8 and 9):** calculus and some basic data analysis
+ and plotting with SageMath; interactions between SageMath and LaTeX.
+ This lecture was 4 hours and 15 minutes long.
+* **Lecture 6 (slides X1 and X2 and respective notebooks):** extra topics;
+ the first part is an introduction to the topic of computational complexity,
+ the second part covers two topics requested by the students via an
+ anonymous questionaire (more cryptography, numerical methods for PDEs).
+
+*Note: Symbolic expressions, a very basic feature of Sage, was introduced at
+the beginning of Lecture 5 but used extensively only in the following lecture.
+In hindsight it would have been better to swap the contents of the two
+lectures and do Symbolic expressions and calculus before algebra. This is
+because the Algebra part requires more specific constructions (polynomials,
+rings), while one can do most calculus operations simply working with
+Symbolic expressions.*
+
+### Homework
+
+There were 4 homework assignments, 2 for LaTeX and 2 for SageMath,
+accounting for 100% of the students' final grade.
+
+For the LaTeX assignments some of the exercises are of the type "copy this
+thing that you see here" and others were of type "write some stuff in LaTeX,
+it does not matter what". The rationale behind the latter type is that I wanted
+the students to use LaTeX for whatever they were going to use in their daily
+life, inlcuding (if they wanted) homework for other courses.
+
+Most of the SageMath exercises simply required the students to compute some
+things, without much "real" programming involved, with the exception of
+the second exercise of homework 2. For that one I tried to do something
+"fun", but I am not very satisfied with the result: in the end it was harder
+to understand the problem than how to solve it.
+
+### Final comments
+
+(I will elaborate my comments on the course overall once I receive the
+course evaluation from the students)
