Re: Mathematica and Education
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg64972] Re: Mathematica and Education
- From: "KvS" <keesvanschaik at gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2006 05:15:03 -0500 (EST)
- References: <dulsnr$39r$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hi Jerry, I just want to give a general response since I'm of course not familiar with your exact situiation. Having said this, according to me "I just took a course in Advanced Electromagnetic Engineering and I'm happy to say that I did not perform a single pencil and paper operation. I did all the homework and exams using Mathematica." is not necessarily a good thing. In the Netherlands there's been a reform of education with as one of the results the introduction of a powerful "graphical calculator", that means the possibility to plot, do some statistics, numerically calculate integrals etc. It turns out that a lot of people lose touch with the maths behind the scene and the calculator starts acting as a black box so that one only needs to know the order of buttons to press to get a result. Consequently people make typical mistakes, e.g. not being able to recognize when an obvious numerical error is made in a plot of a function and not at all knowing what to do if a small modification of a known problem is posed for which the calculator doesn't work anymore. My point is just this: Mathematica is fantastic, but only useful in teaching if the action behind the scenes is also being taught. Best, Kees