Re: [Phys-l] Should equation solving be done with calculators and robots or by hand?

[Steve Highland <shighlan@uslink.net>]

 John Denker wrote in part:

> The biggest practical problem at the moment is lack of support.
> The computer algebra documentation is not very Muggle-friendly.
> Somebody needs to write a nice tutorial that covers the tiny
> subset of features that is needed in an introductory course.
> This includes documenting how to avoid the usual neophyte
> mistakes (such as expecting the system to be more capable
> than it actually is).

Actually, I found the opposite to be true. For some reason I ended up
playing with MAPLE a few years back with a small group of students and we
discovered that it was way TOO powerful. Unless you told it to only look for
real valued solutions or otherwise restrict its attention it would spit out
a flood of complex values, zeta functions, series solutions... I mean, WOW.

After quite a while we finally stumbled onto the "assume" statement, which
(among other things) allows restricting a symbol (like a mass m, say) to
only positive values.  Then we made better progress.

You are absolutely right that documentation is key.

> Some pros and cons:
> -- quickmath is free but very limited, for instance when it
>  comes to chaining together a long calculation, AFAICT.

I think a limited robot like QuickMath (which is based upon Mathematica) may
be a good place to start for beginners.  After I was introduced to it by a
student, other students seemed to pick it up rather easily.  When our whole
class was using it at the same time it got hung a few times, though.
Nothing ever works the way you want it to all the time.  [I usually use the
short version of this statement:  "Nothing ever works!"]

Steve Highland
Duluth MN