In recent months, there has been an explosion of unsolicited “junk mail” on the Internet that is both a nuisance and a hindrance to communication. We deplore the practice, we respect your privacy, and will not intentionally share your email address with any list. With this mailing, we will “bcc” the recipients’ names in order to maintain even that level of privacy.
It is our great pleasure to announce Project WELCOME, which is a National Science Foundation Project, sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, and will in the next two years, bring at least 64 new Mathwright Library WorkBooks to new MAA website. We hope to continue the project beyond the first two years, and so we look forward to a growing extension of the New Mathwright Library. There will be a pointer to that website from the Library, also. The Project WELCOME materials will be available simultaneously in Mathwright Library format, and in our proprietary Lava applet, to be viewed directly in web browsers.
The Project is directed by James E. White, your Library Editor, and the author of Mathwright. It is co-directed by Bill Hawkins, Dan Kalman, and Samad Mortabit. The WorkBooks that will be developed under the auspices of the project will consist of eight course sequences, each sequence specifically designed to support a course in the undergraduate mathematics curriculum. Each sequence will be written collaboratively by a team of two teacher/authors, to be tested and utilized at the home institution of one of those teacher/authors. These sequences will be downloadable and readable in the Mathwright Library player, just as the Library WorkBooks are now. The Project WELCOME activities will begin with a week-long workshop in Seattle in July, 2000, on authoring with Mathwright Author 2000, and will continue into the coming year.
Project WELCOME is part of our ongoing effort to encourage teachers to create their own interactive mathematical material for their students. There is a great myth that While the teams of developers have been assembled for the first year, we will solicit, in various publications (including the Mathwright Library), applications from participants for coming years. One of the important points of growth for our project, which is unfortunately not covered in the present NSF Award will be the development of Middle school and High school level materials. We are eager to support this development, and encourage inquiries from any interested teachers at info@mathwright.com We offer a special discount on the authoring programs to high school teachers, middle school teachers, and home schoolers, and you may learn more about our authoring tools at the BookStore
As some of you know, the TimTexts that have been created over the years using IBM’s ToolKit for Interactive Mathematics translate directly (and almost instantly) into Mathwright Library WorkBooks using Mathwright Author 2000. An example is our new WorkBook by Ramon Gonzales: Graphs and Equations of Lines:
Once translated, the new versions may be augmented with multimedia capabilities such as sound, video, hotspots, wallpaper and other enhancements that give them the appearance and functionality of web pages. But these pages know mathematics. And of course, these Library WorkBooks may also be translated to web pages via our Lava applet, so that they may, in fact, be viewed in browsers.
Now that Summer is upon us, it might be a good time to explore the possibility of authoring interactive Mathwright WorkBooks with Mathwright: My Way. The Mathwright: My Way CD is probably the simplest way to enter the world of authoring full-blooded mathematics environments that can be available to your students on the web.
It contains a version of the Library Player that can be freely used by your students either for home use, or (more importantly) over campus intranets. And it contains the Mathwright Author 2000 program, so that you may create new workbooks from scratch, after you have stepped through our extensive tutorial. It also contains all 150 WorkBooks currently in the Library. You may modify, improve, and extend these as you like to suit your own purposes.
James E. White, Editor
If you came here from the old building,
