Over a period of several years I wrote and rewrote a set of Maple .mws files for use by my students in an introductory class in Ordinary Differential Equations. The files consist of a series of interactive readings on using Maple to learn a particular DE topic. Associated with each reading file is another file of exercises on the topic.
If you examine these files, you will see that they amount to rather more than the usual set of laboratory exercises such as are available in several commercial workbooks. My intent in these lessons is to use Maple to teach differential equations techniques, rather than to teach about using Maple. On the other hand, the persistent student who works through these lessons will surely become an expert at using Maple.
In my course I assign a Maple-supported lesson per week and have the students submit the exercises electronically (either by modem and FTP or from a campus computer site). I find that I can read their work into Maple and correct it in a reasonably short time. After doing the first few, I can usually spot key results that indicate things must have been done correctly, score the paper, and ship it back to a system disk from which the students can fetch it from the network. It helps greatly that most students make few errors in doing the exercises. Of course, I do not depend entirely on the computer assignments as homework. The students also turn in the usual amount of hand work. This, of course, means that the students are actually doing more work than in other sections of the course that do not use Maple. I have found that most students are content with the extra burden. Most of them enjoy using Maple and readily see that they are developing a useful skill for their further work, which is often in some engineering course that applies differential equations.
To obtain a copy of the shareware click on
Maple files for DE
Load this file into the directory you want to
use and run de.exe. It will explode into about 80 files. The files are in DOS format;
however, they can easily be imported into a Macintosh machine (and probably others).
You will probably need to use a DOS machine to run de.exe.
If your web server cannot accomodate this transfer, you can obtain the file at
ftp://ftp.uidaho.edu/pub/ibmpc/math/.