Give Me Tools, Not Tutorials

Designing Exploratory Tools and Student Labs for Use in an Introductory Course in Ordinary Differential Equations

Marcus McGuff, Professor of Mathematics

Austin Community College

Abstract

At the community college level, many instructors are hesitant to devote class time to teaching the use of Mathematica. In fact, some faculty do not  feel comfortable enough to use Mathematica for in-class demonstrations. Also, few students have access to Mathematica outside school facilities. This presentation discusses the design of Mathematica-based tools and student lab assignments, with examples from an introductory course in ordinary differential equations with the following goals:  

Little or no knowledge of Mathematica is needed for use; 
suitable for use by faculty in classroom demonstrations, but easily usable by students; 
flexible enough to allow broad exploration of a topic, to encourage repeated use; 
make good use of dynamic/interactive content to add something new to student understanding and engage their interest; 
labs should ask students to use the provided tools to explore non-trivial questions; 
and everything should work both in a full version of Mathematica and in the free Mathematica Player software, though with reduced functionality.

Examples are available at http://www.austincc.edu/mmcguff/mathematica/diffeq