Computer Tools for STEM

Course Description:

Graphing calculators are powerful tools that help solve many problems, but only if you know how to use them, and school seldom provides opportunities to work on your calculator skills. Using the graphing calculator of choice of the student, we’ll drill basic operations and learn advanced techniques useful in calculus, physics, statistics and chemistry classes. Depending on the needs of the student we’ll cover evaluating functions, graphing complex functions, numerical solutions to equations, differentiation and integration, and one- and two-variable statistics.

In addition, online tools such as GeoGebra and Wolfram Alpha are now available that can assist in understanding and visualizing even the most difficult problems. These programs are like laboratories, where students can experiment with complex mathematical and computational ideas, investigating cause and effect and seeing concrete results. These are tools used by professionals to solve many kinds of modern, relevant problems.

Finally, for the most advanced or ambitious students, we’ll look at computer algebra systems such as SageMath, and investigate the most popular programming tool of modern scientists, Python.