Mathematica for the Beginning Teacher

Henry Shapiro
Department of Computer Science
University of New Mexico

In this talk we present some anecdotal evidence about aspects of
Mathematica that were hard for an experienced computer science
professor to learn and teach.  These problems invariably arose when
constructing Mathematica notebooks, where it was desireable to have no
interaction with the notebook other than changing a few parameters at
the beginning of the notebook or the contents of a data file.  The
difficulties included extracting data from lists, scope of variables,
immediate versus delayed assignment, and order of evaluation.  Our
experience with freshman engineering students, shows that once the
tricks of the trade are learned, Mathematica becomes an effective tool
for solving engineering and science problems, and is considerably more
useful to the beginning student than knowing how to program at the
level of skill gained from a one or two-semester sequence in
programming.