Title: Help in Using Symbolic, Hand-Held Calculators in Teaching Engineering Mathematics

Authors: Gilles Picard, Kathleen Pineau (Canada)

Affiliations: Ecole de Technologie Superieure, Montreal, Canada

Abstract: Since the 1999 fall semester, the TI-92 Plus or TI-89 has been a compulsory purchase for new students entering our engineering school (almost 1000 enrolments a year). The purpose of this presentation is to share our impressions of this campus-wide experiment and to communicate the solutions that we considered and adopted in order to help students and faculty members with the use of these calculators.

As the introduction of this hand-held technology forced us to re-assess our goals in teaching mathematics, it also stimulated many discussions among faculty members. What do we want our students to learn? What is important? In particular, what should they still be able to do manually? Following our experience, in the summer 2000, we collected questions that students or instructors often asked about the calculators. We then designed (with the assistance of two colleagues, Michel Beaudin and Chantal Trottier) the web site http://www.seg.etsmtl.ca/ti, which provides quick and easy access to information on the use of these calculators. Its guided tour, FAQ, and different documents were designed to meet the specific needs of our students and faculty members.

We also worked on extending the use of the calculators to more courses. We met with professors from the four engineering departments and presented the calculators potential, gave workshops, and informed them that their students now have this technology at hand.

So far the results are positive, students and most of our mathematics instructors are adapting to this new technology. Theres still resistance from some faculty members and we must continue to put forward the benefits of integrating computer algebra in our teaching.