Good Morning All!

As a gentle and constructive start to 2001, members may be
interested in attending the "Mathcad Academic User Forum" at
Imperial College on 8th January 2001.

Further information is attached below, but please note that spaces
are limited so you should email the contacts given in the
information below if you wish to attend.

Wishing all a very Merry Christmas and a Merrier New
Year.....Robert S


MATHCAD ACADEMIC USER FORUM

We are pleased to announce that a Mathcad Academic Users' Forum will be
held at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Imperial College,
Exhibition Road, London SW7, on Monday 8th January 2001. You are cordially
invited to attend this event, which begins at 10:30 am and will end at
approximately 4 pm.

The meeting will include presentations from Professor Colin Campbell of the
University of Waterloo in Canada; Dr Mick Bromilow from the Open
University; and Dr Jon Gibbins of Imperial College. Abstracts of Professor
Campbell's and Dr Bromilow's talks are appended. There will also be a
demonstration of the newly released Mathcad 2001.

The day will conclude with an open discussion about Mathcad. Paul Sloane,
Vice President International of MathSoft, will be on hand to answer your
questions, and technical specialists from MathSoft and Adept Scientific
will also be present. This will provide an opportunity to share experiences
and raise issues relating to the use of Mathcad in teaching and research.

Lunch and refreshments will be provided with the compliments of MathSoft
and Adept Scientific. The event is free of charge, and is open to faculty
members in universities and other educational establishments, whether they
are currently using Mathcad in their teaching or research, or considering
doing so.

We feel sure that the presentations, demonstration and discussion will
contain much to interest you, and we would welcome your participation. We
believe this User Forum is a valuable opportunity for Mathcad users in
education to exchange views and experiences, and to provide feedback to the
developers.

We hope you will be able to join us for this meeting, despite the short
notice. Space is limited, so please email me as soon as possible to let me
know if you can attend, or contact my colleague Sharon Robinson on 01462
480055 (email [log in to unmask])

With season's greetings.

Yours sincerely,
Paul Bragg

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ADEPT SCIENTIFIC plc
Amor Way, Letchworth, Herts, SG6 1ZA, United Kingdom
Tel:  + 44 (0)1462 480055    Fax:  + 44 (0)1462 480213
Email:  [log in to unmask]
Web:  http://www.adeptscience.com
WebStore:  http://www.adeptstore.com
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ABSTRACTS

Professor Colin Campbell:

"Mathcad is used in over 20 courses at the University of Waterloo,
including Linear Algebra, Calculus, Statistics, Differential Equations,
Classical and Quantum Mechanics etc. and is very  well-accepted by students
because of its intuitive mathematical user interface (unlike Maple or
MATLAB). Close to 2000 UW students have bought personal copies for $15
under our site license.

"Waterloo is coordinating a Canada-wide Educational Site License Programme
for Mathcad in all high schools, colleges and  universities.  Schools will
have the opportunity to  test-drive Mathcad at no cost for a year to try it
out in actual courses.  So far several universities and high schools across
Canada are doing so.  Provincial funding is  being sought across Canada.

"The talk will also present examples of where Mathcad has been integrated
into computer labs in Linear Algebra courses at Waterloo (in place of
MATLAB), with emphasis on  symbolic manipulations (using the built-in Maple
kernel)."

Dr Mick Bromilow:

"Mathcad has been used in Open University courses since 1997, when 20,000
licenses were bought so that students could use Mathcad 5 on our two
foundation courses MST121: Using Mathematics and MS221: Exploring
Mathematics. In 1999 a new level 2 course in applied mathematics MST207:
Mathematical Methods, Models and Modelling, was presented for the first
time in which students used Mathcad 7 extensively to explore algorithms and
to solve problems.

"As the course team chair of MST207 I will concentrate on that course,
explaining how we incorporated Mathcad into the course and made it easy for
students to use it. Mathcad was also used in some of the 15 multimedia
packages that were developed for the course and these will also be
illustrated.

"I am now chairing a new level 3 course on mathematical optimization, that
will be presented for the first time in 2002. If time allows I shall
outline some of the issues that have arisen in using Mathcad in this course
and how we are planning to deal with them."





Robert Surowiec (Tel: 0121 414 7670 EMail: [log in to unmask])
Information Officer
LTSN Maths, Stats & OR Network
School of Mathematics and Statistics
The University of Birmingham
Edgbaston                          tel 0121-414 7670/7095
Birmingham  B15 2TT                fax 0121-414 3389

The Maths, Stats & OR Network is part of the Learning and Teaching
Support Network, which provides discipline-based support for
learning and teaching in UK universities.

More information can be found at http://ltsn.mathstore.ac.uk