Instant Calculus

New PowerTools for Calculus I and II provide instructors with ready-made lessons for the whole semester

"Maple is what teachers do after class, after grading, after student tutorials and after committee meetings," says Greg Moore, mathematics instructor at Cerritos College, who has used Maple extensively in his teaching. Moore’s experience with time pressure in the teaching profession is typical. While most instructors recognise Maple’s power to enhance mathematics education, heavy administrative responsibilities circumvent many teachers’ best intentions to develop Maple lessons for the classroom.

This challenge led Waterloo Maple to establish Education PowerTools, a suite of free, ready-made Maple lessons for undergraduate and high school mathematics courses. In June of this year, Waterloo Maple introduced PowerTools for Calculus I and Calculus II. Each course supplies over 25 Maple lessons, roughly one for each topic covered in a standard calculus curriculum. These new PowerTools round out Waterloo Maple’s calculus offering, which also contains a Calculus III course and 100 Calculus Projects, a set of Maple lab assignments that students complete on their own. The projects cover all three semesters of introductory calculus and are available in "basic" and "honours" levels.

The PowerTools worksheets are downloadable for free at http://powertools.adeptscience.co.uk/education.html and are ready to use "out of the box", saving teachers days or weeks of Maple development time. However, the top beneficiaries of the Maple lessons are the students, who will experience the beauty of calculus interactively, liberated at last from endless chalking on the blackboard.