Maple

Maplets for Calculus

Intended Audience:

Maplets for Calculus will be of interest to a wide audience:

• Students who are studying single variable, differential and integral calculus, including simple differential equations, sequences, series and polar coordinates. Students will find these Maplets useful when studying for a quiz or exam and when working on homework problems from their textbook.
• Faculty teaching Calculus I and II can use the Maplets in a computer lab setting to give their students practice with basic concepts. The Maplets can also be used as classroom demonstration tools.
  The included Maplets require only a minimal knowledge of Maple.

Product Description:

Maplets for Calculus is a collection of pedagogical Maplets designed to help students learn calculus. Some of the Maplets help to build intuition and some provide practice with routine computational techniques.

Most of the Maplets support both algorithmically generated (random) problems as well as user-entered problems. This allows students to enter a specific problem from another source, such as a textbook, or to use the Maplet for drill practice in preparation for a quiz or exam. Instructors can enter a problem to illustrate a specific concept. In a lab setting, the algorithmically generated questions can be used to allow each student to work on a different problem and use their findings to motivate a general result.

The authors also welcome any other feedback that might help to improve the Maplets for Calculus collection including suggestions for additional maplets.

For education purposes, the Maplets in this collection are designed to be highly pedagogical. Most of the Student[Calculus1] Maplets that come with Maple are calculators – you tell the Maplet something you want to visualize or compute and the Maplet shows or computes the requested object. By contrast, the Maplets in the Maplets for Calculus collection ask the student a question and the student works through intermediate steps to obtain the answer. The Maplet checks intermediate results, tells the user if their answer is correct or where it is incorrect and provides hints along the way.

New Version Now Available, Updates Include:

• Three new Maplets have been added to the package.
• To enhance the ease of use, improvements have been made to standardize the layout for the entire collection of Maplets.
• Improved hints and expanded previewing of mathematical expressions with MathML.
• Improved answer checking and suggestions for identifying errors.
• Increased ability for students to enter their own problems.

Feature List:

• A full Table of Contents and sample videos may be seen at
  http://calclab.math.tamu.edu/maple/maplets/Contents.html

Download Size:

• 4.8 MB

Technical Requirements

• Any supported Maple platform.
• Maple 9.5 or above.
• Flash Player plug-in from Macromedia, (Only needed to view sample videos) available at http://www.macromedia.com/downloads/

Technical Support

Terms: Standard

Author Information

Philip B. Yasskin
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics
Texas A&M University
3368 TAMU
College Station, TX 77843-3368
e-mail: yasskin@math.tamu.edu
homepage: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~yasskin/
phone: (979) 845-3734

Dr. Yasskin has been using computer algebra systems since 1976 and Maple since 1992. He is the co-author of the VecCalc package of Maple commands for doing vector calculus computations. He is the principal author on two Maple lab manuals for single and multivariable calculus. For the last year he has been the Maple computer lab coordinator at Texas A&M University. The Maplets for Calculus are used in these labs.

Douglas B. Meade
Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director
Department of Mathematics
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
e-mail: meade@math.sc.edu
homepage: http://www.math.sc.edu/~meade/
phone: (803) 777-6183

Professor Meade has been using Maple – for research and teaching – for more than 20 years. He is the author of the ODE PowerTool, a collection of worksheets supporting a full semester course in ordinary differential equations, and Calculus with Maple in Blackboard, an collection of Maple resources supporting the first semester of calculus. His most recent educational project has been the creation of lab materials for use by all Calculus I and II students at the University of South Carolina. The Maplets for Calculus are used in these labs.

Technical Support

Please contact the authors.
Philip B. Yasskin: yasskin@math.tamu.edu
Douglas B. Meade: meade@math.sc.edu

The authors also welcome any other feedback that might help to improve the Maplets for Calculus collection including suggestions for additional Maplets.