Math 242, Spring 2013
Sections 010, 012, 014
About Maple
In the labs for this course, you will be introduced to the computer program "Maple".
Maple is what's known as a "computer algebra system". Basically, it can help you immensely
when it comes to big numbers, messy algebra, and graphing.
Some of your homework problems will be made easier if you gain some familiarity with Maple.
However, your quizzes and tests will just use pencil and paper and will not involve Maple.
Becoming acquainted with Maple will be very helpful if you take further math courses
such as 243 or 341. But even if you don't take those courses, your Maple experience
in this course should be useful. Maple can save you time on tedious calculations,
and can also help you visualize things.
Maple is not free software. Probably, not many of you will want to purchase Maple
for your home computer. (But if you do, there is a student discount.)
Instead, you will probably want to use Maple at one of the various computing labs
on campus. For more information, see here
and here.
The usual advice for computing labs applies. If you have to leave the lab in the middle of
working on something in Maple, you will probably want to save your Maple worksheet on a USB drive
(or email it to yourself). If you have finished a Maple worksheet and want to look at it later,
it may be useful to export as a PDF; that way you can view it and print it on computers that
don't have Maple installed.
In addition to your time in the labs with the teaching assistants, some previous instructors
for 242 put some material about Maple on their webpages that you may find useful.
See here
or here.
Math 242 main page