Developing Open and Flexible Computing Environments for Teaching Mathematics and Science

Most software packages for the teaching of mathematics contain only a limited set of tools, utilities, and procedures. Therefore we often have to use more than one computer program to teach different subjects. This situation makes teaching very inefficient: We need to teach our students how to use each tool, we need to teach different, environment-dependent strategies for solving problems, and sometimes we even need to adapt to completely different computing philosophies. An ideal teaching package, on the other hand, would allow teachers and students to customize the program by modifying the resources within the program, adding their own procedures, functions and operations, and might even allow them to build their own mathematical libraries. In this paper, we show that MuPAD, a computer algebra system from SciFace Software and the University of Paderborn in Germany, is gradually becoming such an ideal electronic teaching environment in this sense since it already meets several of the mentioned requirements. We will show how teachers can build their own libraries, add and integrate them with MuPAD resources, and use them in their teaching with both a standalone and an online version of MuPAD. Finally, we will discuss some of the advantages of this open and flexible environment.