[seul-edu] Response to Linux in education report

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

This is from Eric Hawk, on LinuxToday:

It seems to me that xfig would be helpful. It is a standard drawing
package on most installations. A grid can be enabled, and there are
rulings along each axis. When line segments are drawn, its length,
dx, dy, and angle relative to the starting point are given (if you
wanted to delve into polar coordinates in addition to Cartesian).

SmTrek was a multiplayer net game based on Star Trek tactical
combat. It was set in a 2-dimensional world, and was not graphical
in nature. The positions of all ships, planets, and starbases were
given in terms of distance and angle. It really did encourage
visualization. I have not been able to find it on the internet
anymore. I know there is a similar game, called MTrek, which is
3-dimensional, but otherwise similar.

StarOffice has a spreadsheet application similar to Microsoft's
Excel.  Plotting is possible in StarOffice in terms of ordered
pairs. In addition, you could use the spreadsheet application to
generate ordered pairs corresponding to the various shapes of
analytic geometry (lines, parabolas, circles, etc.) and then plot
them.

MuPlot is an open-source symbolic and numerical computing
application which would be able to do just about anything you'd
like. Mathematica is similar in this respect, but is not free.

Eric :)

--
Doug Loss                 God is a comedian playing
Data Network Coordinator  to an audience too afraid
Bloomsburg University     to laugh.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Voltaire