Course Support

With rapidly increasing interest in distance learning and web mathematics courses, it is natural for teachers to wonder where user-friendly interactive mathematical content can be found in some variety, and at an affordable price on the web. The New Mathwright Library and Café may offer a simple solution.

We are pleased to announce the first and largest collection of interactive mathematics books on the web. Starting with the NSF-MAA Interactive Mathematics Text Project in 1992, our software was designed both by teachers and for teachers. While there are many well-written Applets available to teachers on the web, we think that you will find our Microworlds a refreshing and powerful new alternative for the web support of teaching mathematics.

Mathwright authors are undergraduate and secondary teachers who create their books with our award-winning software in an attractive dynamic and storytelling fashion. In fact, we chose the name Mathwright because the word connotes (like the word playwright) the active and creative role of our teacher-authors in crafting their mathematical lessons and stories.

Students and teachers usually appreciate the colorful and user-friendly appearance of our books, as well as the opportunity those books give them to experiment and to ask their own questions, to read at their own pace, and to focus in a playful way on those topics that interest them.

Based on a series of three NSF grants and sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, the Mathwright Library is an experiment in computer-based pedagogy. The Library is an internet-based growing collection of over 240 interactive mathematical and scientific multi-page explorations. Presently it comprises 1742 interactive pages, each of which can be thought of as an Applet. But since these hypertext documents vary in size from 1 page to 55 pages, the comparison with single-page Applets may be misleading.

Please take a look around. And if you stop by the Café you will find a number of free books that you can examine before joining. If you like what you see, then we invite you to join with an Institutional License or individual membership for one year. We will explain how to do that below.

Library books are hypertext documents. They have the look and feel of web pages, and students may either read our Microworlds online in their browser , or they may read any of our books offline on their own computers. Actually, the online versions are embedded in web pages and appear as multi-page Applets.

While our books are built in LISP on top of Java, they really represent a new web technology that extends the Applet concept in a direction that makes both authoring the books, and especially reading the books, easy and fun. They are dynamic explorations that were designed to support student-directed, individual and collaborative learning in a wide range of topics encountered in undergraduate mathematics instruction: from college algebra and discrete mathematics, through single and multi-variable calculus, linear algebra, abstract algebra, topology and differential equations.

You might like to read our online article Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications. You will need the Personal MathwrightWeb Control that you can download from our article there. It will give you an overview of our strategy and goals.

The Library was funded from 1995-1997 by the National Science Foundation (NSF ILI-LLD DUE #9551273). It offers a resource on the web that teachers and students may use in a variety of ways for classroom demonstration, laboratory activities, and self-paced private study.

We have recently completed Project WELCOME which added 36 Microworlds, all written by college teachers, to the new Mathematics Digital Library (MathDL) hosted by the MAA. The Library Director, James White, also directed Project WELCOME with the support of NSF DUE/EMD grant #9952530 and during that tenure developed the Microworld technology

Individuals may join the Library for a yearly subscription of $20.00. We encourage schools to obtain an Institutional License for only $250.00 per year. This entitles the entire institution to use the Library for one year either on the Local Network, or on the students' and teachers' private machines. When you purchase the license, you receive a CD with the collection of current Library books and Players in case you want to install them on a network machine, or distribute them to students for their own machines.

The CD comes with the login password that will give any user of your school access to all of the books of the Library online. This will allow you and your students to visit the web Library on the internet and download any workbooks or read any Microworlds online that they choose. The license (and password) also allows users to read the books at home, or on non-networked campus machines.

You may purchase an Individual Membership or Institutional License with a credit card, with an email order, or a purchase order at the Library Store or by mail or phone.

In the Mathwright Library, you will find a world of live resources for all of your web courses, that are ready to use. We hope that some of you may be inclined to join the growing cadre of Mathwright authors themselves, and create their own Microworlds for their web pages. Some samples of other Mathwright sites are posted here, and our Microworlds fit snugly in Teaching/Learning environments like WebCT and BlackBoard. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions at all about the Library, or how your department might use it. We also offer a variety of services that can get you started.

The entire hypertext version of our new book, Calculus in Action, is free for all. Why? For two reasons.

First, it is a new kind of mathematics book. It is dynamic, written from the point of view of the new dimension of reader interaction. We make the dynamic version of our book available, online or offline, only to Library members. The static hypertext version, though, is available free to any reader. We believe at the Library that this will be the shape of the teaching and learning environments of the near future. Books like this one will come to life in the hands of the teacher and student, full of the rich demonstrations and experiments that will encourage readers to pursue their own ideas by asking "What if?" questions.

The 500 page book, which consists of 49 lectures and 43 Interactive Explorations, is presented in 10 Mathwright Microworlds. All of the text is contained within the Microworlds, just as it is in the text version here. It may be printed, lecture by lecture, from either place. Visit our Table of Contents or the Index to see the range of topics that we cover. They are nearly all about gravitation. That is the theme of the story, our main question, for which the Calculus is the language that provides our best answer.

And the book is also about a wonderful unification of what had seemed to be two separate questions. How do objects fall? And how do the Moon and the Planets move? These are really the same question. And the history of that question is the subject of our book. We begin to ask the first question in the introductory Pre-Calculus chapter. The second question will lead the reader, standing "on the shoulders" of John Kepler and Isaac Newton, to a new understanding of the Calculus itself, as we follow Newton in the answer that he found.

Second, this is not a textbook. It is a story of Calculus that will lead the reader through the equivalent of two or more years of the mathematical foundations of the subject, but it is not constrained by any curriculum. Rather, it traces the development of Calculus as a circle of ideas that grew out of the 17th Century dawning understanding, in the hands of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, of the nature of Gravity. It refers to original sources, and is generally written in the spirit of the "Great Books" strategy championed by such American schools as St. John's University, and widely practiced abroad. Thus, it discusses the history and philosophy of these ideas, as well as the mathematics.

The motivated reader of Calculus in Action will arrive at a mature and deep understanding of Calculus in the way that it is used today. And, because of our discursive and problem-oriented approach to the story, the reader will also appreciate its origins in 17th Century science as well as its relations to modern areas of mathematics, such as Linear and Abstract Algebra, Topology and Differential Geometry.

In fact, this book will likely strike students as a new kind of mathematics book, unlike one they have ever seen, and certainly not like any Calculus Textbook, either in content or in form. To that end, each Microworld Section of each Chapter of the book first discusses a problem that we need to solve to deepen our understanding of the gravitation theme, and then recruits and explains the techniques that Calculus can supply to help us solve it. The problems are not easy ones, but we attempt in the lectures and interactive explorations to bring them to life, so that readers can experiment, and become familiar with them. The book is written for readers who enjoy mathematics, and have the curiosity and the desire to see the small part of it that we develop here, as a whole: roots, branches, and leaves.

We give you the text version free in order to encourage you to explore this new medium with us, and frankly, to join the Mathwright Library. When we come to discuss the retrograde motion of Mars in the night sky that so complicated Ptolemy's picture of the motion of the planets, we show you what the ancients saw, in a 3 dimensional model Solar System. When we discuss the grand conservation laws: conservation of angular momentum and conservation of energy, we let you put them to use as you attempt to dock the Space Shuttle with a Satellite. You will find that this is not easy! But the main explorations are designed to show you how each new concept: inclined planes and vectors, center of gravity and radius of curvature, to name a few, came to be incorporated in the Calculus. Teachers: Be prepared for a few surprises in the choice and range of topics. Library and Institutional members are invited to correspond with the author on any questions about the material or the interactive explorations.

These Explorations are designed to encourage readers to pursue their own ideas by asking "What if?" questions. They also play a heuristic role to help the reader visualize new constructions, techniques and concepts. So check out the text version of Calculus in Action, then use your Library membership to bring it to life! Library members may read these 10 Microworlds (that contain within them the full 500 page text) in their browsers using MathwrightWeb (or MathwrightNET), but they will probably prefer to download them to read offline with Mathwright32 Reader (or Mathwright32 Reader NET). For a beginning student of Calculus, either version will provide years of enjoyable learning in our alternative to a Calculus Text.

Would you like to have a Workshop on Mathwright at your school? Learn how to use Mathwright Author to build interactive mathematics and science books for your on site or distance courses. Or learn how you can make best use of the Library through an Institutional License to support courses that are in place or are planned.

We offer on site Workshops (5 hour minimum) for local faculty and staff that we can schedule at your convenience. If you would like to learn more about them, please send contact information at our Contact Us page and we will call you.

Read about Mathwright Microworlds in our new article in the Mathematical Association of America's Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications. You will need the Personal MathwrightWeb Control that you can download from our article there.

Now you can create interactive mathematical Microworlds like the ones in the Library for your own web pages. That's right, you can build powerful and highly interactive Mathematical Applets, and put them on your website. And you can do it in a few hours (instead of months) with our revolutionary point-and-click Mathwright32 Microworld Builder.

As you step through the 10 Tutorial Chapters at our Online Mathscript Help Center (or if you download the Help to read on your machine) please feel free to ask any questions you have to our staff at the Library on our Contact Us page. We would like to convince you that the time is right for you to begin building interactive mathematics at your website, and will respond promptly to your questions.

You can learn about what you will be able to do with Mathscript, our new language for applets, if you visit our complete online manual. It shows how our 275 built-in commands, functions, and protocols can be used to build active and colorful interactive mathematical explorations. In fact, the Tutorial steps you through 9 complete projects, starting with the basics, and finishing with a 3 Dimensional interactive simulation. If what you read interests you, you may download and read this free HTML document off line at your leisure.

The Mathwright32 Author program is the only WYSIWYG mathematical Microworld builder available to teachers today. It was created by teachers, and its design is based on 18 years of development and refinement following feedback from the teachers who use it. See for yourself how easy it is now to create rich and powerful mathematical Applets for your own website, using a point-and-click interface and a mathematics language that are together much easier than Java. If you would like to purchase one, you may do that at the Library Store. You may also download and distribute to the visitors to your website the free Personal MathwrightWEB ActiveX Control or the Personal MathwrightNET ActiveX Control.

Finally, we realize that a browser is not necessarily an ideal place to think hard about mathematics. So you may give readers the opportunity to download and read any Microworld with our free Mathwright32 Reader, which is an application that runs independently of the browser. Thus, students may read your Microworlds offline if they choose to, without having to be connected to the web at all! You would have to zip up the Microworld so that your readers can download it from your website if you wanted to offer this option.

Our use of ActiveX controls to support the Microworlds reflects a design decision that, after two years experimentation with "pure" Java, we felt compelled to make. While we built a Java 2 prototype of our Microworlds in 1999, we decided that, in order to achieve a simple WYSIWYG author interface to create learning environments that will not distract students from the mathematical story, we need the full attention of a single compliant and mature operating system.

The Microsoft Windows operating system is the canvas on which we have chosen to paint. Like a Java Applet, a Mathwright Microworld is designed to elicit and invite reader questions by presenting a simple User Interface. But a Microworld has the power and range that a generic applet can seldom achieve, and this makes possible a wide variety of reader experiences. It invites students to play. Take a look, see what our authors, all over the world, are up to.

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