Re: Laptop requirement?

["Carl E. Mungan" <mungan@USNA.EDU>]

Ivan Rouse wrote:

> I realize that Excel and other spreadsheets are everywhere but when a
> student does a calculation using a spreadsheet it is not at all apparent
> what method, i.e. equation, he used since the equations are not visible
> just results.  That seems oppposed to the idea that they should show their
> work so the instructor knows how they got their results.  Perhaps there are
> ways that students can explicitly state their equations and get around this
> problem.  For this reason several departments on our campus have
> standardized on Mathcad since the equations are up front and clear.

Since you use Mathcad in this way and I have contemplated doing the
same at times, I wonder how you handle two issues. I assume you have
students print out their Mathcad workbooks and turn that in. (If it
was done electronically, this would be less of an issue, but then the
same goes for Excel.)

1. A workbook consists of pages which extend both horizontally and
vertically. By default these pages are not numbered and the page cuts
don't show up until you do page setup. So it's easy to end up with
some jumble of printed pages, large numbers of which are blank
(because it prints every page in a max row x max column matrix),
unnumbered, and with graphs/equations/etc. extending across page
cuts. (In all fairness, many of the same problems occur in Excel.)

2. Mathcad doesn't quite show everything. In particular, I assume
there are going to be graphs. But what got graphed? Unless the
students are very clear about the legends, choice of symbols, etc,
there's no way of knowing if they graphed say an uncorrected or a
corrected measurement of magnetic field. It doesn't really help that
the quantity they called "Mag" on page 3, got redefined on page 5,
using a constant defined globally on page 7! Also Mathcad doesn't
show what data files were accessed, because this information is
buried in one of the worst dialog boxes I have ever had the
misfortune of struggling with in a program, namely the "Associate"
operation.
--
Carl E. Mungan, Asst. Prof. of Physics  410-293-6680 (O) -3729 (F)
      U.S. Naval Academy, Stop 9C, Annapolis, MD 21402-5026
mungan@usna.edu    http://physics.usna.edu/physics/faculty/mungan/