RE: Resources for high school student?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg24131] RE: Resources for high school student?
- From: "Ersek, Ted R" <ErsekTR at navair.navy.mil>
- Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 02:11:49 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Melanie Traxler gave some resources that are supposed to be useful to high school students who are thinking about buying Mathematica. In doing so she referred readers to: "<http://www.wolfram.com/solutions/precollege/resources/notebooks.html> for downloadable notebooks that you and your son can look through. In particular, I would recommend that you download the tutorial notebooks entitled "Intersession" from this page. This group of notebooks includes lessons on solving equations, defining functions, graphing, and more with Mathematica. In order to view the notebooks, you may download a copy of MathReader." -------------------- I went to that web page. 1- I had a very hard time going to that web page without having my web browser (Microsoft IE) crash right after I attempt to scroll down to the list of notebooks. It seems the only way to make this work was to ensure the web browser window is expanded to take up the whole screen. Ok, so this looks like a Microsoft bug, but Wolfram Research should design the web page to avoid this bug. 2 - A potential customer shouldn't be required to download and install Math Reader to see examples of what Mathematica can do. One should be able to access (via the above URL) an HTML version of the above notebooks. Hey doesn't Mathematica have a feature to convert notebooks to web pages? Wolfram Research could make the HTML versions with a few mouse clicks. 3. I down loaded the Introduction notebook, and it had no output cells! A potential customer using MathReader can only read the description of what would be displayed if the input cells were evaluated using Mathematica, but the notebook doesn't make this clear. Next I down loaded the Basic graphing notebook, and it had no output cells and no graphics. As a result the potential customer using MathReader can only read about the graphics that would be displayed if they had Mathematica. -------------------- If the potential customer was patient enough to get that far they experienced multiple crashes of their web browser. They went to the trouble to down load and install MathReader. After all that they still can't see examples of Mathematica output and graphics (at least not from the above URL). How often will one of these potential customers to put "Mathematica for Students" on their shopping list? -------------------- Regards, Ted Ersek Down Load Mathematica tips, tricks from http://www.verbeia.com/mathematica/tips/Tricks.html