M@th Desktop and MD Tools - Mathematics and Mathematica Made Easy for Students

Abstract

We present two add-ons for Mathematica for teaching mathematics to undergraduate and high school students. These two applications, M@th Desktop (MD) and M@th Desktop Tools (MDTools), include several palettes and notebooks covering almost every field. The underlying didactic concept is so-called "blended learning", in which these tools are meant to be used as a complement to the professor or teacher rather than as a replacement, which other e-learning applications do. They enable students to avoid the usual problem of computer-based learning, namely that too large an amount of time is wasted struggling with computer and program errors instead of actually learning the mathematical concepts. M@th Desktop Tools is palette-based and provides easily accessible and user-friendly templates for the most important functions in the fields of Analysis, Algebra, Linear Algebra and Statistics. M@th Desktop, in contrast, is a modern, interactive teaching and learning software package for mathematics classes. It is comprised of modules for Differentiation, Integration, and Statistics, and each module presents its topic with a combination of interactive notebooks and palettes. Both packages can be obtained from Deltasoft's homepage at http://www.deltasoft.at/ .