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Re: The audience for Mathematica (Was: Re: Show doesn't work inside

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg102084] Re: The audience for Mathematica (Was: Re: Show doesn't work inside
• From: Richard Fateman <fateman at cs.berkeley.edu>
• Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 05:08:29 -0400 (EDT)
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Helen Read wrote:

> 
> It *is* useful to average college students. Every one of my calculus 
> students learns to use Mathematica successfully, even the below average 
> students. The Classroom Assistant palette has made the learning curve 
> even easier for them.

By what measure is it useful to these students? What most observers 
would consider a mark of success is that the students learned the 
subject matter (calculus) more effectively with Mathematica than 
without.  I recognize that this may be hard to measure without a control 
group, but do you have some evidence that Mathematica helped them learn 
calculus?  Being introduced to Mathematica per se may be useful to some 
of them who have a career that involves continued access to Mathematica 
or perhaps similar programs, but this is somewhat unlikely to be the 
case for "average" math students.

> 
> My students use Mathematica on some of their quizzes, which I give them 
> daily during the accelerated summer session. The students are permitted 
> to raise their hands and ask me for help if they run into issues with 
> Mathematica during the quiz. By the end of the second week of my summer 
> class, they were rarely asking for help with Mathematica on the quizzes. 
> We are now three weeks in, and today *nobody* asked for help during the 
> quiz. All of them were able to do what they needed to do without any 
> help from me. Nobody was perplexed.

I am curious as to what kinds of questions you had on your quizzes that 
required or even suggested the use of Mathematica for obtaining the 
answers. Derivatives and integrals? Numerical evaluations? Plotting?
To what extent were the computations uniquely symbolic as opposed to 
(say) something that could be done with a numeric hand-held calculator?

While Mathematica as a computational engine may serve many audiences, it 
seems that different views of the program, tailored to each audience, 
ease the learning. This is a fairly common phenomenon for complex 
systems, not just software.

RJF

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Re: The audience for Mathematica (Was: Re: Show doesn't work inside
    • From: Andrzej Kozlowski <akoz@mimuw.edu.pl>

• References:
  • Re: Show doesn't work inside Do loop ?
    • From: AES <siegman@stanford.edu>