I am a high school math teacher that has recently started to use Mathematica. I am using it in my Mathematical Modeling (MM) course and would like to be able to expand it into my AP courses eventually. I have limited ability with Mathematica and would love any help in teaching my students the language. The progress has been much slower than I would like. The MM students are using math they have learned in high school to find solutions to more ambiguous problems. Students research information and work in small groups finding solutions to these problems. We use the SIAM M3Challenge (https://m3challenge.siam.org/) model and APA style writing for our papers. This year and last year we have so far looked into small ideas like: Can King Kong exist? (COMAP exercise), Are the Olympics a good city/national investment to host? How is the Opiad epidemic affecting us and what is the cost to the tax payer for solutions?; Determine the statistics in a sport and player position, then create a new statistic to find the best five players and apply to our local high school to determine our best players. Eventually the students will have a capstone project that requires them to research a topic in a career of interest. They are to work with a mentor and report their findings. I would also like to have them add to Wolfram Demonstrations at some point.
So far the students have only written one paper using Mathematica. They have found it difficult compared to Word or Google Docs. The math we have used has not really needed the power of Mathematica. It has been years since I have programmed and I am having difficulty teaching the language skills and the putting together of programming lines. Fortunately, I have some pretty adept kids. We are using "An Elementary Introduction to the Wolfram Language" but it doesn't really help us put together thinking through a set of instructions for a particular task. It would be great to have a resource that teaches beginning code along with a particular question/math concept. Are there any particular groups of people that students can reach out to for help?
We have desktop license and cloud license. We use Chromebooks in a 1-to-1 school and found issues with the system. The desktops work fine. The cloud edition on Chromebook is much more restrictive than the desktop. For instance, we don't have access to the palettes in cloud for writing purposes. The students miss the ability to simultaneously write on a team document that Google allows. We had issues with viewing Wolfram Demonstrations for a long time, but can now see them while using the desktops. The CDF Player was not working for us. Some of the issues are because of our firewalls, etc.
