Freshman Engineering Computation Lab

Frederick W. Chapman, Bruce Char, and Jeremy Johnson

fwchapman@alumni.uwaterloo.ca, bchar@cs.drexel.edu, and jjohnson@cs.drexel.edu

Department of Computer Science
College of Engineering
Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA

This talk reports on our experience teaching freshman engineering students to  
use the Maple computer algebra system to solve mathematics and engineering
problems.  The course is taught as a sequence of three one credit computation
labs.  Students alternate working on in class labs, given as Maple worksheets,
and testing their knowledge of the concepts introduced in the labs through
Maple TA, on online automatically graded quiz/exam system built on top of Maple.

The goal of the Computation Lab is to impart the fundamental knowledge and
practical skills needed to use Maple effectively as a computational tool, both
in upper-level engineering courses and in the workplace after graduating.
Students are introduced to some useful ideas from computer science and software
engineering, such as elementary programming constructs, simple data structures
and result testing.  The Computation Lab shows students how to use Maple's
symbolic, numeric, and visualization features for modeling, simulation, and
data analysis motivated by the problems of engineering. 

We will report on our experience teaching nearly 700 engineering students using
this setup; the lessons learned, difficulties encountered, and ideas for
further refinement of the course.