Maple 'down-under' in Engineering Mathematics Education

GF Fitz-Gerald & G Keady
Australia

3   Engineering use of Maple, Matlab and Mathcad: its implications for teaching Engineering Mathematics

Real engineers do (at least occasionally) have to do some sums, and CA can help in filling in the details. CA systems which either have inbuilt wordprocessing or are integrated with word-processing systems can, and are, used as methods of presenting, in a usable form, materials used by engineers. Early examples of this include: Mathcad’s ‘Roarks Tables of Stress and Strain’ and Mathematica’s ‘Structural Mechanics’ pack which are discussed in [KCT]. The educational uses of these are discussed in [KFW]. (Indeed, [KFW] also describes PWS products which were then in preparation but, for reasons outside the authors’ control, failed to reach fruition.) Most Australian universities deliver worksheets to support the learning of Engineering mathematics. An extensive collection of materials, for example those developed by Lopez, are also now readily available: see maplesoft.com. Thus, at an appropriate stage in university Engineering mathematics education, it is becoming essential that students are exposed to actually using such packages.

Which Engineering maths package is used varies from university to university; and even may well vary with time within the same university. It is mostly a decision for the Engineering departments to make (albeit with professional guidance provided by mathematics departments), with mathematics departments supporting their preferences in the service teaching to their students.

3.1 A bit of history

UWA, Curtin and Murdoch Universities, seem to have been the first Australian universities to use Maple in the teaching of large-enrolment Engineering maths classes, commencing in 1989. Of these universities, only Curtin has stayed on the “pure-maple” track. At UWA the physicists and chemists use Mathematica, and the Engineers use Matlab. At Murdoch, matlab seems to be the main package in Engineering maths; Scientific Notebook, etc. has also been popular with some maths staff.

RMIT, UNSW, ANU, UQ and others began using Maple to support their teaching of Engineering maths in 1990 or very soon after. The first three of these have remained predominantly “pure Maple” sites, although RMIT is now incorporating Matlab into more of its Engineering maths courses. Until recently UQ was in a similar position, but as from this year, the engineering students have been taught using Matlab and its Symbolic Toolbox.

All of the above packages, used in stand-alone mode, can now be regarded as ‘mature technologies’. The authors expect that their use will continue much as before into the immediate future.

4   Computer Aided Assessment (CAA)

An obvious use of CA is in marking students’ ‘sums’. There are many CAA systems available, some of the open-source ones being described at

http://mantis.york.ac.uk/serving_maths/

Managed Learning Environments (MLEs) (of which WebCT, Blackboard and moodle are examples) are providing exciting opportunities to explore the use of CA and CAA in Engineering mathematics courses. WebLearn activities are immediately accessible directly from within RMIT Blackboard courses. A recently released Remote Question Protocol (which is incorporated within the AiM-xml released in July 2005) facilitates the connection of various CAA packages with MLE’s (though, so far, the only MLE using it is moodle).

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