Building Interactive Textbooks and Documents with Mathematica

Eric Schulz

Walla Walla Community College

Abstract

A textbook contains many figures—some insightful as they are in static form, but many needing to be brought alive in order to tell their stories. The uninspired readers may secretly hope to be engaged in the reading, but the printed page with unchanging figures and nothing active to involve them in the reading process fails to grab their attention. Inquisitive readers may yearn to see how changing something can lead to new insights, but a static text is simply unable to respond. Visual learners feel the text is not helpful to understand a concept, but they "see it" once a teacher explains and draws a figure that tells a story while it is being drawn. We need a new generation of interactive textbooks and documents that are engaging, who effectively , and where the static printed page no longer dominates. Mathematica's writing capabilities, interactive figure creation, programmatic document processing, and document distribution support provide a unique solution to address the challenge of creating a new generation of interactive textbooks and documents.