Symbolic Algebra in the Engineering Classroom: The Coming Revolution

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This project develops a curriculum innovation that promises to increase student understanding, productivity, and participation in the classroom and shift the focus of the class to more open- ended and design-oriented problems. The equipment requested are 30 powerful workstations running Mathematica. This classroom/laboratory is used to teach a year long, Sophomore level, Electrical Engineering, Circuits & Systems class sequence.Recent NSF-funded projects (both on our campus and others) have shown that students learning calculus and differential equations in computer algebra equipped classrooms have increased productivity, understanding, and participation. Installing workstations in an engineering classroom allows students to participate actively in the lectures. The powerful plotting routines allows them to visualize the relationships between voltages, currents, etc in a circuit. The computer algebra system's ability to manipulate symbolic equations both increases the student's productivity and requires less time in the lecture for re-teaching manipulative mathematics skills. This extra lecture time is used to address design-oriented topics such as worst-case studies and sensitivity analysis. Finally, student retention in engineering is expected to increase since those students who have weaker manipulative mathematical skills will be at less of a disadvantage, and therefore less likely to drop out.