CASE STUDIES ON USING THE COMPUTABLE DOCUMENT FORMAT TO ENHANCE THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE: HIGH SCHOOL PHYSICS AND UNDERGRADUATE HEAT TRANSFER

The authors of this paper have been working during recent years on: repositories, content generation, and learning materials distribution. Thus, we have designed and used materials for teaching a high school physics course (videos developed with Moovly) and a heat transfer course at the undergraduate level (interactive content developed with Mathematica). These and other learning tools are available to the students through a university repository. Although the students have given favorably reviews to these materials, the fact that they access each material separately from the others is a drawback. Therefore, we have come to the conclusion that the students could benefit from having all the learning tools intertwined within a text, resulting in an interactive text that may be more appealing to the students and, therefore, more efficient.

Thus, we have started a university-funded project designed to create comprehensive interactive lessons both at the high school and the undergraduate level. The tool selected to accomplish this task was Mathematica because it allows creating notebooks that may include: text, audio, videos and interactive tools. Furthermore, Mathematica notebooks may be distributed in computable document format (CDF) which permits a student to have free access to the contents and full interactivity, the later through the cdf-player software. It should be pointed out that the university has a Mathematica campus-wide license.

From the point of view of the project itself, experts on Mathematica and spreadsheets taught courses on those topics to the project members, who later were grouped according to the different project needs.

The project has just started but it is possible to show the first results. Thus, in this paper we detail the design and development of two notebooks:
1) Newton’s laws (for a high school physics course) and
2) Bessel functions (for an undergraduate heat transfer course).