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Mathwright Author Manual Download Center

Download each part and execute it separately. The complete manual is 450 pages, and it begins with a 175 page tutorial. Files will be installed in mathwrig/manual directory unless you choose another destination. The files are in Microsoft WORD 97 format, and the file readme.doc will explain how to put the manual together in case you want to print it. The Mathwright Author 2000 program is available for download at the Library Store.

What is Mathwright?

Mathwright 2000 is a mathematical and scientific software construction set. With it, you may create and read documents called WorkBooks. These WorkBooks support interactive mathematical and scientific exploration. WorkBooks may be read in either Library Player 2000, or the free Library Player: Mathwright Player 2.1. Authors may distribute the Library Player 2.1 along with their royalty-free WorkBooks either on disk or over the web.
Workbooks created with Mathwright Author may also be submitted to the Mathwright Library. If the WorkBook is published here, the author must agree to allow other authors to modify and extend it, to create new WorkBooks, if they so desire. In any case, the WorkBooks they publish here will remain intact and unvarying (unless they decide to upgrade it). Once in the Library, WorkBooks may be freely accessed and read by our worldwide readership.
Now Mathwright 2000 is a unique system for creating mathematical and scientific interactive texts. It was entirely designed by Teachers, for Teachers. Mathwright was not designed by text publishers, nor by software engineers. And it shows. The result of fifteen years of research and refinement, it has been used extensively in workshops on the design of interactive texts at numerous colleges and universities around the country.
During the final five years of its development at the Institute for Academic Technology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it has benefited from almost continuous collaboration with teachers at the college and secondary levels.
We believe that, at least for now, our object-oriented, LISP-based design presents teachers with a simple and powerful vehicle for translating their mathematical and pedagogical ideas into truly interactive texts for students. Mathwright WorkBooks may place a variety of Objects on their pages. These objects are automatically connected to one another through a powerful underlying Mathematics Scripting Language called MathScript. An author creates an object simply by drawing it, and later by tailoring it to her needs through its menu. Each object has its own menu of properties, and these may be modified at any time. Many of the objects may be “scripted” with their individual Scripts that are built upon both predefined and author-defined commands, programs, and mathematical objects.
The idiom of Mathwright is transparent and simple, based, as it is, on the graphical, hypertext, and object-oriented style of windowing environments, like the web. In the most important senses, Mathwright 2000 workbooks have the visual appeal and intuitive feel of web pages. They are easy to create, and authors have fun doing it. Our environment is much easier to work with than HTML. This is especially true because our scripting language, MathScript, understands mathematics. Mathematics is at the heart of MathScript, whereas it is at best a second-class citizen in HTML. See for yourself as you read our manual!