Re: Recom on Mathcad/Mathematica

["Ivan E. Rouse" <irouse@LASIERRA.EDU>]

Thanks for the feedback!

At 15:33 8/24/00 -0700, Daniel Schroeder wrote:
> Our campus (four-year state university) has only Mathematica,
> not MathCad.  I don't know enough about MathCad to offer a full,
> objective comparison, but I can make a few comments.  First, I
> love using Mathematica myself.  Second, it's a rare student who
> can learn to do Mathematica calculations that take more than one
> or two lines.  One-line graphs and symbolic and numerical calculations
> are no problem to learn, but when you start to build up calculations
> in multiple steps, the syntax gets confusing for students and they
> start to need a lot of hand-holding.  At least that's my experience
> in trying to add Mathematica-based exercises to traditional upper-
> division physics courses.  If you devoted a large chunk of the
> course to learning Mathematica, it might be different.

I am not a Mathematica user but the ease of use or learning curve issue is
a concern I have.  I am sure it is very powerful but in a programming
language sort of way and many of our students are, unfortuantely perhaps,
not "programming literate."  However the tools like Mathcad make it trivial
to do complex tasks that would have necessitated a significant programming
exercise just a few years ago.

> Finally,
> it's my understanding that in a printout from Mathcad you can't
> actually see all the steps that were taken to produce the output,
> because many of the operations are mouse-driven.  Therefore, if
> you want to document all the steps of your work, Mathematica
> might be preferable because it's more text-based and you have
> a full record of every key you typed.

I have used Mathcad extensively and I guess I would have to disagree a bit
with the statement above.  Certainly every tool of this sort has a syntax
that needs to be followed but nearly every mathematical operation in
Mathcad can be done several ways: by using pull-down menus, using icon
paletes or direct keystrokes.  I haven't learned all of the keystrokes but
from the icon palates you can do virtually everything and the worksheet
math looks very much just like what you would write on a piece of paper.
So I think it is quite easy to reproduce a worksheet by looking at the output.

Ivan Rouse, Professor and Chair
Physics Department, La Sierra University
4700 Pierce St., Riverside, CA 92515
email: irouse@lasierra.edu
web: http://physics.lasierra.edu/irouse/
phone: 909-785-2137, FAX 909-785-2215