The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 27

The Education Vector¶

April 1989

Edited by Alan Sykes

Reprinted from VECTOR Vol.5 No.4. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association; for more information about the British APL Association, contact the Secretary: Graham Parkhouse, Dept. of Mech. Eng., University of Surrey, GUILDFORD.

Contents¶

Dr Alan Sykes,
Dept of Management Science and Statistics,
University College of Swansea,
Singleton Park, SWANSEA SA2 8PP

Editorial¶

by Alan Sykes

It is now nearly a year since I was elected to the committee of the British APL Association. What a busy year it has been. I suppose it is an axiom of present-day life that there is never enough time to do all the things one would like to do, and I'm sure that this is true of those of us in education who are interested in APL.

One consequence of this, as readers of Education Vector will have observed already, is that my articles tend to be biased towards the application of APL to statistical matters. There is no doubt in my mind that APL serves the statistician very well. It is also a marvellous language for use in Education, and my article this issue is very much an educational experiment - to try to present the essentials of Statistics both at the level of number crunching (data analysis) and also at a more theoretical level by presenting, in parallel, tools that aid the understanding of the models which underpin the data analysis.

This, in retrospect, is rather an ambitious thing to try and I can only hope that you, the reader, will give me feedback on the success or otherwise of this experiment. Ideally, it would be nice to think that universities were (as they used to be) places where academics are encouraged to try bold experiments in education - I could then justify a sabbatical to sit down and write a textbook! Sadly, if there is no financial benefit to the university involved, one can forget such pipe dreams.

At the Mathematical Association Conference at Sheffield shortly after Easter, fears were expressed that the advent of the national curriculum would stifle experiments in mathematical education from primary school upwards. Nevertheless, there was at the higher levels of mathematics teaching, an acceptance of the existence of powerful computing tools that must inevitably influence the teachers' approach. It was good to be able to give a live demonstration of the power of APL to a group of teachers who had not met APL before.

I also found it very instructive to listen to talks on the use of PROLOG and DERIVE. PROLOG is of course a 'logic crunching' language, and DERIVE allows the user to perform elementary algebraic manipulations including differential and integral calculus. I couldn't help feeling that it would be nice to have such tools in the APL environment and, though my colleague Allan Prys Williams can supply the former, I know of no computer algebra package in APL. Any offers?

In this Education Vector, I have proposed a problem for all readers, be they experienced APLers or relative newcomers. This is to the former by way of a gentle reminder that there is a whole class of computations that does not always fall easily into the APL environment. I would like to see a more open discussion on ways of proceeding with such problems - suppression of such topics does APL a disservice in the long run.

Recently, I received a letter from Jaromir Antoch in the Department of Statistics at Charles University in Prague. I find it very encouraging and exciting to know that Education Vector finds its way to many different countries. I extend a warm invitation to all readers to submit notes, letters and articles for inclusion in forthcoming issues.