Australia

Home mConferences mPublications mEducation mContent mResources

Technology Adoption in Mathematics Education: A Global Perspective
A Short Article Series
December 2005

Page 3 of 3

Maple 'down-under' in Engineering Mathematics Education

GF Fitz-Gerald & G Keady
Australia

5 The way forward

Co-operation and a genuine sharing culture between staff and universities would assist in understanding the usefulness of these technologies in improving Engineering mathematics education. There exist a number of examples of such co-operation already.

Sometimes these are international and commercial, for example the Maple Application Centre, MaplePrimes, etc. at maplesoft.com.
Sometimes they are international and open-source, for example the AiM project (though the sharing of questions is ad-hoc).
Sometimes they are national (or regional). One example is the UK-based LTSN. We will have to wait and see whether Australia’s ICEME will adopt similar roles to those proven to be useful as part of the LTSN.
Sometimes they are just something that individuals do. For example the authors will be collaborating on exploring machine translations of question codes between AiM and WebLearn in the latter half of 2006 when the second author will be working in Melbourne.

"Cooperation" is seen to be increasingly important, partly because some of the software is getting to be quite complex to use (for example maplets), and packages have become highly polished. Moreover students now expect "prettiness" in any interface that they are presented with.

6 Conclusion

Many Australian universities are developing excellent teaching materials supporting Engineering maths. But the duplication of effort needs to be reduced; one possibility would be the development of a repository of tested and peer-reviewed materials. Ideally, such a repository would include successfully implemented collections of CAA questions.

References

[KCT] G. Keady, C. Cetinkaya and A. Triulzi. Mathematica, Packs for Mechanical Engineers and the elastic torsion problem. Pp 278-297 in ”Proceedings of the Asian Technology Conference in Mathematics”, Penang, June 1997. (Edited by Wei-Chi Yang and Yahya Abu Hasan.)

[KFW] G. Keady, N. Fowkes and J.Ward. Interactive maths texts from Computer Algebra Systems: use in teaching engineering students. Pp 137-144 of Vol 2 of Proceedings of the Australian Computers in Education Conference, Perth, July 9-13, 1995. Ed. R. Oliver and M. Wyld. Published by ECAWA: Perth. (ISBN 1 875534 10 5)

[HDR] T.L. Harman, J. Dabney and N. Richert, Advanced Engineering Mathematics Using Matlab. (PWS 2nd edition: 1999).

Page 3 of 3

Editor Page

Articles by Country

Australia