TeX has become one of the most popular tools for editing teaching materials or textbooks in collegiate mathematics education, since it enables usual mathematics teachers to easily produce high-quality mathematical documents. Its capabilities for visualization and computation are fairly limited, so that many teachers simultaneously use various…

The research presented here is a group case study of students learning calculus in a Computer Algebra System (CAS) environment which examines the following research questions: What are students' perceptions of the role of technology in their learning? What is the students' relationship to CAS? What is the effect of learning in a CAS environment on…

Discrete Mathematics instructors and students have long been struggling with various labelling and scanning algorithms for solving many important problems. This paper shows how to solve a wide variety of Discrete Mathematics and OR problems using assignment matrices and linear programming, specifically using Excel Solvers although the same…

Most students in U.S. universities are required to take a collection of core courses regardless of their degree or major. These courses are known as "general education" courses. The general education requirements typically include at least one mathematics course. Unfortunately each year hundreds of thousands of students in the US do not succeed in…

In the last decade, there has been a notable increase in the use of ICT in the development of teaching tools and, consequently, their integration in different disciplinary areas at different educational levels. University has not escaped this reality, and although most modern technological means are far from being available in every classroom--at…

In recent years, a considerable number of teachers in Spain have been using DERIVE to teach math subjects in High Schools and Universities. This software has been used by the authors of this work as a support tool in Mathematics courses for Engineering. Since Texas Instruments does not support DERIVE, we were faced with finding an alternative…

Dynamic/interactive graphing applets can be used to supplement standard computer algebra systems such as Maple, Mathematica, Derive, or TI calculators, in courses such as Calculus, Differential Equations, and Dynamical Systems. The addition of this type of software can lead to discovery learning, with students developing their own conjectures, and…

This article explains the didactical design of M@th Desktop (MD), a teaching and learning software application for high schools and universities. The use of two types of MD resources is illustrated: notebooks and palettes, focusing on the topic of exponential functions. The handling of MD in a blended learning approach and the impact on the…

This paper examines various cognitive strategies applied while CAS (Computer Algebra System) are used in undergraduate-level engineering mathematics teaching and learning. We posed some questions in relation to such CAS use: What kind of tools can CAS offer to enhance different cognitive strategies of students? How can the use of CAS widen the…

We present results of a literature review pilot study (326 papers) regarding the use of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) in tertiary mathematics education. Several themes that have emerged from the review are discussed: diverse uses of CAS, benefits to student learning, issues of integration and mathematics learning, common and innovative usage of…

In this work we will present the ScilabUMA environment we have developed as an alternative to Matlab. This environment connects Scilab (for numerical analysis) and Maxima (for symbolic computations). Furthermore, the developed interface is, in our opinion at least, as powerful as the interface of Matlab. (Contains 3 figures.)

A perennial problem in computer-aided assessment is that "a right answer", pedagogically speaking, is not the same thing as "a mathematically correct expression", as verified by a computer algebra system, or indeed other techniques such as random evaluation. Paper I in this series considered the difference in cases where there was "the right…

In this paper, we are proposing the use of forensic case studies as a means to provide students with interesting problem solving opportunities that capitalise on the popularity of several TV series and shows. It also satisfies their natural curiosity about how answers are found to seemingly complex real life problems. We begin with a very brief…

Interactive computer-based simulations have been applied in several contexts to teach statistical concepts in university level courses. In this report, the use of interactive simulations as part of summative assessment in a statistics course is described. Students accessed the simulations via the web and completed questions relating to the…

We present principles for the design of an online system to support computer algebra enabled questions for use within the teaching and learning of mathematics in higher education. The introduction of a computer algebra system (CAS) into a computer aided assessment (CAA) system affords sophisticated response processing of student provided answers.…