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# Emacs, eev, and Maxima - now!

Eduardo Ochs - IRC: edrx, <http://anggtwu.net/>, @eduardoochs on Telegram, <mailto:eduardoochs@gmail.com>

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I teach Calculus in a bad campus of a good federal univeral in
Brazil. The main campus of that university is located in a big city
and has lots of resources, and I work in a small campus, that is in
a small city, and that has few resources - and we get the students
that don't get enough points in the entrance exams to go to better
places. In this presentation I will show how I've been teaching
Maxima, and Emacs, and eev, to my students.

With very few exceptions my students are "beginners" in a sense that
is inconceivable in developed countries - they're not people for
whom things like spreadsheets, Jupyter Notebooks, and VSCode are
"intuitive"... most of them have never seen a terminal in their
lives, and many of them have so little familiarity with computers
that they don't know, for example, that keyboards have a key called
F8.

It turns out that if we _define_ "beginners" in the right way -
hint: not by statistics! - then we can find a way to present Maxima,
and then Emacs and eev, that makes all sense to the "beginners" in
my classes, and that approach lets them install everything and
become (sort of) autonomous very quickly. A few students were able
to install everything - WSL, Debian, Emacs, eev, Maxima - and run
the examples in about one hour; most others took between one hour
and two hours, and some others had to plonked.

<http://anggtwu.net/ORG/emacsconf2024.org.html>

About the speaker:

Eduardo is the author of an Emacs package called eev, that is a way
of creating "executable notes" that apparently makes very little
sense to people in developed countries. In this talk he will show
how he has been using Emacs and eev to teach Maxima to his students
in Brazil, who - with few exceptions - have very little experience
with computers, and who are not the kind of "beginners" for whom
programs like spreadsheets and VSCode are "intuitive".

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