Published in Vol2 of Proceedings of the Australian Computers in Education Conference, Perth, July 9-13 1995 : ISBN 1 875534 10 5.
Added 1995 AFTER PUBLICATION Since this paper was published, PWS have moved their efforts from disk publication of Maple/Mathematica materials to Web publication. End of 1995 addition.
Added 1997 It appears, in 1997, that PWS/Brooks-Cole are likely to discontinue Zill and Cullen "AEM", concentrating their marketting on O'Neil "AEM" (4th ed.: 1995). Accompanying O'Neil "AEM" are Maple and Mathematica lab manuals. Grant Keady hopes to move some of his ZC materials over to O'Neil. End of 1997 addition.
Added Sept 1998
My home university is having difficulty financing continuation
of Maple/Mathematica licences for large numbers of users.
Several engineering departments are increasing their usage of
Matlab, the Student Edition of which comes with the Symbolic
Toolbox provided. I now have
permission from Brooks/Cole
to produce labs paralleling those they already have in
Maple and Mathematica lab manuals.
This doesn't imply any less interest in the materials in Ma-CAS,
both of which continue to evolve (now both having Export to HTML).
Watch the link
here for links to the Matlab labs.
I have removed the anonymous ftp areas mentioned in the paper.
Use the Web now.
End of Sept. 1998 addition.
Added Dec 1999 ITP have stopped selling Student Maple. UWA's 2nd year Eng. courses - esp. that for Mech/Civil/Environmental engineering - will be changed from 2001 so that monolithic AEM books are less appropriate. Have discontinued my own attempts at publishing CAS support materials associated with AEM texts. Still follow the efforts of others, and world has now reached stage where books/CDROMs built with the CAS packages in mind have been, and are increasingly being, written. This has meant that retro-fitting CAS materials to older books is declining in relative importance, though possibly still worthwhile for widely selling books.
Added February 2001. Lopez' AEM book and CD-ROM appears. The CD has comprehensive coverage in Maple Worksheets of everything in the book, plus HTML-saves of them for people needing to inspect them without using Maple. Good effort. Probably renders the project described in my ACEC95 paper obsolete. (The local changes at UWA the engineers moving away from Maple and from Mathematica, mostly to Matlab, and also major reductions in the syllabi so all "AEM" books cover more than the UWA syllabi, are other factors removing me from the ACEC95 project.)
The Computer Algebra Systems, CAS, discussed in this article are Maple and Mathematica. Both Maple Worksheets and Mathematica Notebooks integrate input lines, output, graphics and textual comment. From Maple V2, the output makes effective use of mathematical fonts and similar facilities are expected in the next release of Mathematica. The capability to present mathematical material, combined with the ease of modifying the input lines and recomputing results, has led to "interactive mathematics texts".
The problem being addressed now is how to provide, in these Worksheet/Notebook formats, materials which are worth being called "texts", rather than "little essays". One method is to hold the series of "little essays" together by arranging that they accompany an existing conventional printed text. The PWS Notebook series of disks covers, for both CAS, various texts put out by the publishing firm PWS. PWS also distribute CAS materials from their Web site. Our own efforts related to preparing materials for possible inclusion in the PWS Notebook distribution to accompany Zill and Cullen "Advanced Engineering Mathematics" (PWS) will be displayed.
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