The project will begin the introduction of Maple technology into upper division mathematics courses by developing curriculum enhancements for MA 401. The project will work with the already well-established suite of software programs, collectively known as the “eGrader project”, that has been developed during the last 4 years in the Department of Mathematics at NCSU. The eGrader software, operating from the server at http://egrader.math.ncsu.edu/eGrader, now handles the entire Maple program for the roughly 2750 students in the calculus sequence of courses each semester, and will easily handle the small increase of about 70 students per year from MA 401.

Professors Robert H. Martin and Larry K. Norris will work with the faculty members who regularly teach MA 401 to identify appropriate topics in the course that will benefit from technology enrichment. Lessons and Maple homework assignments will then be developed for each topic using the eGrader suite of software programs. In the lessons and homework assignments students will apply Maple’s powerful computational engine in solving boundary value problems, and use Maple’s graphical tools to animate, and thereby enhance the understanding of, solutions of partial differential equations.