Hello Janos,
To follow up on a suggestion from Richard Fateman --
if the majority of the work your students need to do
is for numerical computing and plotting, I would
suggest R (http://www.r-project.org/). R has very
good plotting support, and good numerical support, and
it is free software. R is an implementation of the S
language, as is the commercial software S-Plus.
Octave is a good choice too, but I think the plots
are not as nice as in R. On the other hand, Octave has
a somewhat simpler and clearer syntax -- closer to the
ordinary algebra of vectors and matrices.
For what it's worth,
Robert Dodier
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