Archive:FCX/Unconference/FLOSS in Science Education

The goal of this workshop was to ask the attendees about the approaches to free software taken in their educational environments, related to Science.

A lot of universities are using and teaching their students to use privative scientific software, like Matlab, Maple or Mathematica. These universities often have to spends huge amounts of money on multi-PC licenses for the software, or even encourage students to install non-original copies of the software in their PCs. Moreover, the internals of these software pieces are hidden to the students, in clear contradiction with the scientific spirit.

There already exist quite a lot of Free Software replacements for the privative counterparts, like you can check in the Open Source as Alternative website. One of the most interesting emerging frameworks is Sage. As their developers define it, it is a free open-source mathematics software system that combines the power of many existing open-source packages into a common Python-based interface.

The combination of different packages provides the most efficient way to deal with each type of problem and warrants interoperability. For example, Sage can use Maxima to solve a differential equation symbolically and Matplotlib to plot the results, all under the hood.

Another impressive and very convenient feature of Sage its Through-The-Web interface. You can set-up a web server for some students to use Sage in a collaborative environment from their own homes without installing anything on their computers. Try it and break your jaw at the Sage Notebook website.