Maple PowerTools™ go to High School

The problem of how to hold the attention of adolescents during a math lesson has challenged the greatest minds in education for over a century. Greg Moore of Orange Coast College has justoffered a modern solution to this ancient puzzle with the first Maple PowerTools for high school mathematics.

Moore's PowerTools emphasise learning through visualization. In Lesson 12 of the Precalculus PowerTool, for example, students get a visual, intuitive feel for where the "conic" in "conic sections" comes from. In Lesson 8 of the Geometry PowerTool, students see the geometric relationships among the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Ratio and continued radicals. Maple graphics open the door to far more advanced applications than are feasible during blackboard lectures. Moore's lesson on the cosine function in the Trigonometry PowerTool shows plots of not only variations of the expression A cos(Bx-C)+D, but also summations such as for increasing values of n.

Moore exploits these opulent pictures as a plug to students for future studies in mathematics. In the text of the lesson, he alludes to the concept of Fourier series and that they can model common phenomena like heart beats.

Moore designed these lessons so that a teacher could use Maple as the presentation medium for the entire lecture. The teacher caninstantly generate new examples from old ones by simply changing a few values and pressing Enter. The blackboard is almost never needed during the class. Moore also designed each worksheet so that students do not need to learn or understand Maple syntax. Every lesson provides tailor-made Maple procedures for showing its particular concepts. The Algebra I&II PowerTool has some of the most remarkable procedures in the collection. Moore provides routines that show, for example, how to compute the LCM and GCD of two integers, and how to set up a distance-rate-time word problem, as opposed to just producing the final answers. The procedures for each lesson are tucked away in a collapsible subsection, so that neither teacher nor student must confront scary looking Maple code.

All four high school PowerTools are available for free download from http://powertools.adeptscience.co.uk.

Article: Maple PowerTools™ go to High School