Has anyone had experience or have comments about a 1-hour course instructing students how to use a graphing calculator and/or maple?
A few years ago I taught such a creature - it was great fun, but an hour didn’t seem to be enough. The "Flight Manual" makes a decent text; my students were all upper level. With lower division students, it might be more appropriate to work the through "Maple for the Calculus Student," but there’s not enough there for a full course.
At the time, I had thought to try reworking the AIM modules - they were for precalculus and based on Apple II’s.
With a more sophisticated audience, I would like to try using Heck’s "Intro to Maple." Someday doing a graduate course in algorithms with Keith Geddes’ "Algorithms for Comp Alg" would be quite a treat.
I would be much interested in other’s thoughts, too. Next semester I’ll be running a 2 hr course based on Maple, "Computer Algebra for Learning Math." The audience is upper division Math-Secondary Ed majors.
The students have had experience with graphing calculators, some with graphing on micro’s, and a few with Maple.
Most likely they will have finished 2 or more semesters of calculus.
The main course requirement, done as group projects, will be for them to design their own group projects for: precalculus, calculus, and geometry courses (at high school levels).
We’ve been giving 90-minute "JumpStart" classes on Maple for several years. It’s been through many revisions, is fairly stable at this point.
The document for the class [minus answers] is available on our www site.
Implementation of Maple, and the user interface with the system or network. (This is about Maple, not about calculators - unless they all have the same kind of calculator as you are displaying, such a session is not much help I think).
We do it like this. In first-year calculus, in the second lecture, we give a demo of Maple Vr3 in class with a colour LCD for about 30 minutes.
We are running under Windows 3.1, which we also explain briefly. We then give a handout of about 6 pages (including a brief intro to Windows) which they are to execute in the Lab by one week later.
In the intervening week, we reserve the lab for two two-hour blocks at times when most of the students can come if they think they will need help. We are then present in the lab at those times.
This setup enables us to handle 6 sections totalling about 300 students with relatively little instructor time.
This has gone very smoothly this year - there are only a few students who were unable to get output which was largely correct. Let’s note that this depends a lot on your system.
One possible problem - everybody asks for output at the same time, doesn’t realize there will be queueing, and then tries to print several more times.
Note also that we have no boot disks in our public labs, since there are CD-Roms in the machines. If you are not in a Mac or Windows or X-Windows setting then the operating system tends to be an obstacle to progress.
However after this introduction they are just imitating what you have written - it is like typing practice. It is a *lot* more difficult to get most of them to use Maple spontaneously, even if they are in the computer lab very regularly (of course there are some who will use it for anything, whether it is appropriate or not).
It’s necessary to build it into the course by using it in class from time to time, giving assignments which require them to use the help, etc.
Best thing to do: try it out. We’ve been doing this with various software for about 10 years and we still have a lot to learn. Fortunately the software is constantly improving, as is the students’ basic knowledge.
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