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Solutions from Every Perspective: Using Mathematica to Enhance Students' Understanding of Math Concepts

Richard Breheret, Webmaster, Euler/CRDP

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"Mathematica's coherent architecture enables you to write programs in a variety of ways and modify programming paradigms, which allows you to go from one way of writing a program to another. In my field, its uses are unlimited."

Challenge

One of Richard Breheret's biggest challenges as a high-school math teacher is finding a way to help students arrive at answers from different perspectives, whether algebraic or formal, while integrating concepts from primary school to high school.

Solution

Through Mathematica, Breheret had been showing his students how to arrive at satisfactory answers while understanding that in math there won't always be just one correct answer. This led him to work with webMathematica to develop a web interface in which mathematical expressions could be entered simply, including all the terminology specific to teaching math in France.

Benefits

For Breheret, Mathematica's greatest benefit is in how it works behind the scenes, analyzing answers and allowing instructors to see how many times students try the exercises, if they succeed, if they assimilate the concepts and if they have difficulties. When students struggle, Mathematica is there to help.

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