SAGE off Stage: Teaching Electromagnetics with Symbolic Computation Tool

Electromagnetics is often considered the most challenging undergraduate course for many students, and there are several challenges: mathematics, imagination, as well as new concepts and approaches. Instructors and students alike have trouble in dealing with so many new issues in a short period of time. Among these challenges, mathematics is the toughest, as it takes considerable time and effort to learn. In our school, the background of students is very diverse, and some of them even have trouble in doing simple integrals. Fortunately, technology comes to the rescue. SAGE((c)) is an open source symbolic computation tool, and it can be used for symbolic derivation, so every student can find the derivative, integral, and even gradient of functions easily. In addition, it also supports programming in Python((c)) style. With the challenge of mathematics alleviated, more time is available to cope with the challenges of other issues, such as new concepts and approaches. At the end of the semester, students were tested with Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism, as well as surveyed on experience using SAGE((c)). The results were pretty encouraging.