Happy New Year! Now that 2014 is behind us, I thought it would be interesting to look back on the year and recap our most popular webinars. I’ve gathered together a list of the top 10 academic webinars from 2014 below. All these webinars are available on-demand, and you can watch the recording by clicking on the webinar titles below.

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See What’s New in Maple 18 for Educators

In this webinar, an expert from Maplesoft will explore new features in Maple 18, including improved tools for developing quizzes, enhanced tools for visualizations, updated user interface, and more.

Introduction to Teaching Calculus with Maple: A Complete Kit

During this webinar you will learn how to boost student engagement with highly interactive lectures, reinforce concepts with built-in “what-if” explorations, consolidate learning with carefully-constructed homework questions, and more.

Maplesoft Solutions for Math Education

In this webinar, you will learn how Maple, The Möbius Project, and Maplesoft’s testing and assessment solutions are redefining mathematics education.

Teaching Concepts with Maple

This webinar will demonstrate the Teaching Concepts with Maple section of our website, including why it exists and how to use it to help students learn concepts more quickly and with greater insight and understanding.

Revised Calculus Study Guide - A Clickable-Calculus Manual

This webinar will provide an overview of the Revised Calculus Study Guide, the most complete guide to how Maple can be used in teaching and learning calculus without first having to learn any commands.

Clickable Engineering Math: Interactive Engineering Problem Solving

In this webinar, general engineering problem-solving methods are presented using clickable techniques in the application areas of mechanics, circuits, control, and more.

Hollywood Math 2

In this second installment of the Hollywood Math webinar series, we will present some more examples of mathematics being used in Hollywood films and popular hit TV series.

Robotics Design in Maple and MapleSim

In this webinar, learn how to quickly create multi-link robots by simply defining DH parameters in MapleSim. After a model is created, learn to extract the kinematic and dynamic equations symbolically in Maple.

Introduction to Maple T.A. 10

This webinar will demonstrate the key features of Maple T.A. from both the instructor and student viewpoint, including new features in Maple T.A. 10.

The Möbius Project: Bringing STEM Courses Online

View this presentation to better understand the challenges that exist today when moving a STEM course online and to find out how the Maplesoft Teaching Solutions Group can help you realize your online course vision.

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Are there any topics you’d like to see us present in 2015? Make sure to leave us a comment with your ideas!

Kim

Maplesoft regularly hosts live webinars on a variety of topics. Below you will find details on upcoming webinars we think may be of interest to the MaplePrimes community.  For the complete list of upcoming webinars, visit our website.

Creating Questions in Maple T.A. – Part #1

This webinar will demonstrate how to create questions in Maple T.A., Maplesoft’s testing and assessment solution for any course involving mathematics. The presentation will begin with an overview of the basic types of questions available, and then delve into how to create various types of questions in Maple T.A. Incorporating algorithms and feedback directly into questions will also be touched on. Finally, the session will wrap up with an explanation and several examples of how to create better questions using the question designer.

This first webinar in a two part series will cover true/false, multiple choice, numeric, mathematical formula, fill in the blank, sketch, and FBD questions. A second webinar that demonstrates more advanced question types will follow.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Clickable Calculus: Linear Algebra

In this webinar, Dr. Robert Lopez will apply the techniques of “Clickable Calculus” to standard calculations in Linear Algebra.

Clickable Calculus, the idea of powerful mathematics delivered using very visual, interactive point-and-click methods, offers educators a new generation of teaching and learning techniques. Clickable Calculus introduces a better way of engaging students so that they fully understand the materials they are being taught. It responds to the most common complaint of faculty who integrate software into the classroom – time is spent teaching the tool, not the concepts.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Maplesoft regularly hosts live webinars on a variety of topics. Below you will find details on some upcoming webinars we think may be of interest to the MaplePrimes community.  For the complete list of upcoming webinars, visit our website.

Maplesoft Solutions for Math Education

This webinar will demonstrate how Maplesoft’s solutions for mathematics education help teachers bring complex problems to life, allow students to focus on concepts rather than the mechanics of solutions, and offer students the necessary practice to master the concepts being taught.

Key takeaways include:

• How to quickly and painlessly place incoming students in the correct math courses

• How you can use hundreds of intuitive Clickable Math tools to demonstrate and explore up to advanced-level problems and algorithms in the classroom

• How to automate your testing and assessment needs, specifically for math courses

• How to bring your STEM courses to life in an online environment

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Introduction to Maple T.A. Placement Test Suite 10

This webinar will provide an overview and demonstration of the latest release of the Maple T.A. MAA Placement Test Suite. A result of the ongoing partnership between the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and Maplesoft, this product gives you the ability to provide the renowned MAA placement tests in an online testing environment. Learn how the Maple T.A. MAA Placement Test Suite can greatly simplify your placement process and explore the latest additions, including a streamlined interface and new tests to determine your students’ readiness for Precalculus and Algebra courses.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

There is also a recording available from another live webinar we did earlier this month: Introduction to Maple T.A. 10.

After lots of hard work, vast amounts of testing, and enormous anticipation, Maple T.A. 10 is now available! Maple T.A. 10 is by far our biggest release to date - and we’re not just saying that. When we compare the list of new features and improvements in Maple T.A. 10 with that of previous releases, it’s clear that Maple T.A. 10 has the largest feature set and improvements to date.

Maplesoft regularly hosts live webinars on a variety of topics. Below you will find details on some upcoming webinars we think may be of interest to the MaplePrimes community.  For the complete list of upcoming webinars, visit our website.

Bring Statistics Education to Life!

This exciting new webinar will demonstrate some of the ways that educators can take advantage of Maple’s symbolic and numeric approach for statistics education. Examples will include basic statistics theory including descriptive statistics such as measures of central tendency and spread, hypothesis testing, as well as discrete and continuous random variables.

Many examples presented in this webinar will be taken from the new Student Statistics package that was introduced in Maple 18. The Student Statistics was designed with classroom use in mind, and features detailed explanations and instructions, interactive demonstrations, and visualizations, all of which are great learning tools for teaching a course involving probability and statistics.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

Symbolic Computing for Engineering

As engineering applications become more complex, it is becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy the often-conflicting project constraints using traditional tools. As a result, we’ve found there is a growing interest within the engineering community for tools that make engineering calculations transparent and capture not just results but also the knowledge and analysis used throughout the engineering workflow. Engineering organizations are achieving this goal by making symbolic techniques an integral part of their tool set.

In this webinar, Laurent Bernardin will demonstrate how to enhance the early-stage design phase by making mathematical computations explicit and transparent, and then integrating the results into an existing tool chain.

To join us for the live presentation, please click here to register.

I think we all know the routine. We walk to a large classroom, we sit down for a test, we receive a large stack of questions stapled together and then we fill in tiny bubbles on a separate sheet that is automatically graded by a scanning machine. We’ve all been there. I was thinking recently about how far the humble multiple choice question has come over the last few years with the advent of systems like Maple T.A., and so I did a little research.

Multiple choice questions were first widely-distributed during World War I to test the intelligence of recruits in the United States of America. The army desired a more efficient way of testing as using written and oral evaluations was very time consuming. Dr. Robert Yerkes, the psychologist who convinced the army to try a multiple choice test, wanted to convince people that psychiatry could be a scientific study and not just philosophical. A few years later, SATs began including multiple choice questions. Since then, educational institutions have adopted multiple choice questions as a permanent tool for many different types of assessments.

One of the biggest advances in the use of multiple choice questions was the birth of automatic grading through the use of machine-readable papers. These grew in popularity during the mid-70s as teachers and instructors saved time by not having to grade answer sheets manually.

Until recently, there has not been much advancement in this area.  It’s true, Maple T.A. can do so much more than just multiple choice questions, so this style of question is less important in large-scale testing than it used to be. But multiple choice questions still have their place in an automated testing system, where uses include leveraging older content, easily detecting patterns of misunderstanding, requiring students to choose from different images, and minimizing student interaction with the system. Luckily, Maple T.A. takes even the humble multiple choice questions to the next level. Now you might be thinking, how is that even possible given the basic structure of multiple choice questions? What could possibly be done to enhance them?

Well, for starters, in Maple T.A., you can permute the answers. This means you have the option to change the order of the choices for each student. This is also possible with machine-readable papers, but this does require multiple solution sets for a teacher or instructor to keep track of. With Maple T.A., everything is done for you. For example, if you have a multiple choice question in Maple T.A. with 5 answer choices, there are 120 different possible answer orders that students can be presented with. You don’t have to keep track of extra solution sets or note which test version each student is receiving. Maple T.A. takes care of it all.

Maple T.A. allows you to create Algorithmic questions - multiple choice questions in which you can vary different values in your question. And you aren’t limited to selecting values from a specific range, either. For example, you can select a random integer from a pre-defined list, a random number that satisfies a mathematical condition, such as ‘divisible by 3’ or ‘prime’, or even a random polynomial or matrix with specific characteristics. It allows an instructor to create a single question template, but have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of possible question outcomes based on the randomly selected values for the algorithmic variables. The algorithmic variables not only apply to the question being asked by a student, but also the choices they see in a multiple choice question.

You can even create a question where every student gets the same fixed list of choices, but the question varies to ensure that the correct response changes.  That’s going to confuse some students who are doing a little more “collaboration” than is appropriate!

Some of the other advantages of using Maple T.A. for multiple choice are also common to all Maple T.A. question types. For example, you can provide instant, customized feedback to your students. If a student gets a multiple choice question correct, you can provide feedback showing the solution (who is to say the student didn’t guess and get this question correct?) If a student gets a multiple choice question incorrect, you can provide targeted feedback that depends on which response they chose. This allows you to customize exactly what a student sees in regards to feedback without having to write it out by hand each time.

And of course, like in other Maple T.A. questions, multiple choice questions can include mathematical expressions, plots, images, audio clips, videos, and more – in the questions and in the responses.      

Finally, let’s not forget, in an online testing environment, there is no panic when you realized you accidently skipped line 2 while filling out your card, no risk of paper cuts, and no worrying about what kind of pencil to use!

References:

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/dark-history-of-multiple-choice-ainissa-ramirez

http://xkcd.com/499/

http://io9.com/5908833/the-birth-of-scantrons-the-bane-of-standardized-testing

This is one of my favorite events of the year. When we launch a new release of Maple, I get to see the work of so many talented individuals at Maplesoft come together in a form that I am sure will delight, and maybe even surprise you.

We are holding true to our principles with Maple 18. Hundreds of new mathematical algorithms further strengthen a computational engine that will help you tackle your toughest challenges. The user interface experience continues to become smarter, allowing you to focus on getting results without fighting with syntax. Connectivity options are again becoming richer.

A personal favorite of mine is the newly enhanced Explore functionality, which allows you to, with a couple of clicks, go from a mathematical expression to an interactive Math App. Math Apps allow you to explore the parameter space of the expression, gain insight into its behavior and even, in conjunction with Maple T.A., produce a gradeable Möbius App that allows you to assess a student’s interaction with the app and hence their understanding of the underlying concepts. The expanded Explore functionality is just part of a collection of advancements in Maple 18 that support The Möbius Project.

Overall, the new features of Maple 18 are quite numerous and I won’t try to list them all here. However, I do want to mention a few areas that have received special attention:

• Statistics: Maple 18 includes lots of enhancements to statistics computations and visualization, such as new time series functionality that allows you to find patterns, make forecasts, and visualize time-based data. For the classroom, a new Student Statistics package, together with a range of bundled Math Apps, provide a simplified and interactive environment for instructors and students alike.
  
  
• Physics: This package for representing and computing with concepts from general relativity to quantum mechanics continues to grow by leaps and bounds, with over 500 enhancements just in this release alone. We are convinced that this is the best computational environment available for researchers in this area.
  
  
• Engineering: Key enhancements for control analysis, signal processing, and code generation to Python and Perl are just a few of the new features that engineers will note and appreciate. There’s even import/export for STL graphics files, which, amongst other things, means you can now print out your favorite Maple plots on a 3-D printer!

I think you will agree that Maple 18 exemplifies all the effort and attention that we have put into it.  And there’s more to come - this release is just the start of a stream of product announcements that you can expect from us in the coming months. Stay tuned!

On Thursday, Feb. 27, we are hosting our first-ever Virtual User Summit.   This day provides Maplesoft’s academic community a chance to learn more about the different ways Maplesoft technology is being used in education and research, a chance to interact with Maplesoft employees as well as each other, and a chance to get a glimpse into the future of education.

The virtual nature of this conference is a very tangible example of how much technology has changed our lives.  No less dramatic is the effect of technology on education.  In the keynote presentations at this conference, you will learn about Maplesoft’s vision for the future of education. You’ll also get to see tangible examples of technology that is building towards that vision, including sneak peeks of some things we are working on.

Visit Maplesoft Virtual User Summit for the full agenda and to register.  “Doors open” at 8:30 Eastern Time and the keynote presentations start at 9:00.

We are looking forward to this chance to come together and share our passion for technology and technical education.  Hope to see you there!

Maplesoft is a long standing supporter of the Who Wants to Be a Mathematician contest for high school students. For years, we have donated Maple as prizes to winners of the national and regional contests.

This year, being the 25^th anniversary of Maplesoft’s incorporation, the company decided to support several projects that encourage the use of math amongst high school students and young adults. We dedicated a bigger budget towards projects that would enable us to make a significant impact on students and impress upon them the need for math and science in their future careers.

One project we undertook this year is giving an extreme makeover to the Who Wants to Be a Mathematician contest! With Maplesoft as a “Technology Sponsor”, the contest that was administered on pen-and-paper moved to a digital format. We donated our testing and assessment tool, Maple T.A. to administer the tests online, making the software accessible to every student that participated. This meant the students took an online test, and were automatically and instantly graded using Maple T.A.

The 2013 competition is underway, and the results are extremely positive:

• The number of students that participated in the contest doubled this year, with over 2000 students from over 150 schools participating.
• The competition introduced a second level of tests, making the competition more rigorous. After the first elimination round, eligible contestants moved to a second round with questions of increased difficulty levels.
• By avoiding much of the paper work and manual corrections, the organizers saw significant savings in time and money.

Custom test questions were created in Maple T.A., which were accessed by students from a server hosted by Maplesoft. The simple and easy to use interface of Maple T.A. enabled the students to take the test without spending time learning the tool. Maple T.A. supports the use of standard mathematical notation in both the question text and student responses. Maple T.A. also allows free-response questions, including questions that have more than one correct answer.

Who Wants to Be a Mathematician is a math contest for high school students, organized by the American Mathematical Society (AMS), as part of its Public Awareness Program. Ten students will be chosen for the semifinals and two will qualify for the finals to be held at the Joint Math Meetings in January 2014.

More information about the contest that is currently in progress can be found on the AMS website. 

We’ve recently added a new set of questions to the Maple T.A. Cloud for English language proficiency tests. These questions demonstrate how Maple T.A. can be used to generate text-based questions that take advantage of the randomization feature. These questions were created by Metha Kamminga, an Independent Learning Professional in the Netherlands. Metha is a strong proponent of Maple T.A. in Europe, and transformed the testing and assessment system in Delft University before her retirement.

TU Delft University aims to transform learning through the use of technology. Its ambition is to eventually offer fully digitalized degree programs and it believes that digital testing and assessment can play an important role within this process. They are using Maplesoft’s online testing and assessment suite, Maple T.A., to move their courses to a digital assessment environment. To read the full user story, click here.

Visit the Maple T.A. Cloud to access the questions mentioned above and to browse the full collection of questions.

Fourteen Clickable Calculus examples have been added to the Teaching Concepts with Maple area of the Maplesoft web site. Four are sequence and series explorations taken from algebra/precalculus, four are applications of differentiation, four are applications of integration, and two are problems from the lines-and-planes section of multivariate calculus. By my count, this means some 111 Clickable Calculus examples have now been posted to the section.

I am happy to formally announce Maple T.A. 9.5! An expansion on Maple T.A. 9, this release is packed full of innovative features and new tools to assist academic institutions with a variety of different teaching and assessment tasks.

Ever have an issue on your campus where students are required to learn a new piece of technology, but you don’t know how to get them prepared for it? With Maple T.A. 9.5, we have included pre-built content to assist students in learning how to use the Maple T.A. environment, and students can take the new Readiness Test to educate themselves on how to use the system. Tasks such as enabling Java, navigating assignments, grading tests, searching for help, and much more are taught in an interactive setting, and give students the right information they need to become comfortable with Maple T.A.

We haven’t forgotten about instructors and teachers either. We have completely revamped our Instructor Examples to provide educators with a sample question of every single question type in Maple T.A. – that’s over 25 different examples! Instructors are given descriptions, feature lists, and examples for each question type. Additionally, we also created a new Sample Assignment that shows instructors what a typical assignment looks like. They can explore this assignment from both instructor and student viewpoints to test out different options and see what the experience will be like.

Essay questions have been foundational in Maple T.A. for several years now, and Maple T.A. 9.5.makes it even easier to provide feedback for students submitting essays. With the Essay Annotation feature, instructors have the ability to mark-up an essay with comments using a simple drag and drop tool. Using this new tool, your students will be able to see your comments and take note of any issues they had in their writing.

Power outages, automatic updates, computer crashes... we’ve all experienced these unpredictable events, and they can be catastrophic for students trying to meet due dates or if assignments are timed. To help with this Maple T.A. has expanded its Proctor Tools feature.  Instructors can now grant individual students with additional time or date extensions if there are ever any issues.

We’re also giving you a sneak peak at some up-and-coming technology: Gradeable Math Apps. As part of The Möbius Project, you can now embed an interactive Maple worksheet in a Maple T.A. question. Students can move sliders, push buttons, click on plot windows and much more directly inside of a Maple T.A. question. Students are then automatically graded on their interaction with the Math App – just like other question types in Maple T.A.

All these features are all for Maplesoft-hosted and self-hosted users, which also includes all the great stuff from Maple T.A. 9:

• Adaptive Testing
• New Question Repository
• Maple T.A. Cloud
• Hint Deductions
• Reworking Assignments
• MathJax Support
• Distributed Load Balancing
• Permanent User Deletion
• Customizable User Interface
• Multiple Instructors for a Class
• And much more!

At Maplesoft, we are extremely excited about Maple T.A. 9.5, and can’t wait for schools all over the world to begin using it!  And as always, we are very interested in hearing from you about your experiences with Maple T.A., as well as any suggestions you have for future releases.

Thirteen Clickable Calculus examples have been added to the Teaching Concepts with Maple section of the Maplesoft web site. The additions include examples in algebra, differential and integral calculus, lines-and-planes in multivariate calculus, and linear algebra. By my count, this means some 97 Clickable Calculus examples are now available.

In the Algebra/Precalculus section, examples of an

We conduct regular reviews of our platform support to ensure that we are focusing on the platforms that are most valued by our customers. Based on our most recent review, we will offer the next release of Maple on the platforms listed below. As additional versions of operating systems on these platforms are announced, we will take those into account as well.

Supported Platforms and Operating Systems
Windows
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
Windows Server 2008 R2
Windows Server 2012
Windows 8

Linux
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
Ubuntu 13.10 (Planned)

Mac
OS X 10.7
OS X 10.8

Discontinued
Mac OS X 10.6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 update 5
Ubuntu 12.10
Oracle Solaris 10 (the next release of Maple will not be available on Solaris)

If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reply to this topic, or contact us directly at: maplepm (at) maplesoft.com

In a webinar on July 10, 2013, I solved the related rate problem:

Helium is pumped into a spherical balloon at the constant rate of 25 cu ft per min.
At what rate is the surface area of the balloon increasing at the moment when its radius is 8 ft?

A question in the Q&A at the end of the Webinar asked if it were possible to have an animation illustrate the expanding sphere and the rate of change in the surface area thereof.