As part of a program at Arizona State University to modernize science education, Professor Richard J. Jacob has developed and is teaching a workshop course (not a lecture course) in mathematical methods for undergraduate science majors. Student teams work through excercises in paper-based tutorials, using pencil and paper or computer tools such as spreadsheets and MathCad.

In collaboration with Professor Jacob, WhistleSoft has embarked on the project adapting and converting the 18 tutorial paper modules for this successful pedagogical experiment into computer-based courseware. We were recently funded by the Los Alamos National Laboratory's Technology Commercialization Office to build a prototype of one of these paper-based modules. We chose to do the tutorial on Legendre polynomials. We encountered no serious problems, but the transformation was not trivial: 12 paper pages became 109 screens in software. You can run a "shocked" excerpt of one of these sections.

For more information on this project, please contact us. Or, download the white paper describing the Legendre Polynomials prototype.