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Interaction

Getting the student to push a Newton's method button five or six times during the course of a solution, writing down each iterate, is much to be preferred to a simple black-box approach. It is the idea of iteration, after all, that is central to the theory of dynamical systems. Similarly, step-by-step programs for linear algebra (exchange this row with that one, etcetera) are to be preferred at the beginning stages of learning how to solve linear systems of equations. Get the students to perform more actions than simply pressing one key.


Rob Corless
Mon Jun 12 17:07:22 PDT 1995