Updating CENG303
By: Scott Esterholm and Mark Pond
The purpose of this project
is to improve the quality of Maple education in the Rice undergraduate chemical
engineering curriculum. This was
accomplished by making changes in the following areas:
We created a Maple cheat
sheet to provide chemical engineering students with a quick and easy reference
guide for essential Maple functions.
This sheet was not only created for CENG303 students, but junior and
senior chemical engineers, too.
Printer-Friendly Microsoft Word Version
We converted the numbering
of the assignment for CENG303 to a chronological order. Previously, the assignments were grouped by
programming language and increasing difficulty.
This numbering led to confusion on assignment due dates, difficulty in
grading and a number of other problems.
The new numbering should cut down on both student and TA headaches.
Modified Assignments
In addition to creating a
cheat sheet for Maple and renumbering the assignments, we also changed the
content of the assignments to better prepare students for CENG402. The following assignments have been changed:
(Note: Additions to the
assignment are in red text and deletions are denoted with strikethrough text.)
Unix
Review and Introduction to Maple
The first change we made was
to move the creation of a homepage to the graphics assignment. Many students were not creating their own
homepage under the previous system. We
felt website creation would be more adequately covered if it was included in
the graphics assignment. The second
change involved stripping the assignment of the convu and convh unit conversion
programs. These programs have gone
mostly unused by the students and there are better systems that are widely
available. We feel that the unit
conversion system on Google is easier to use and far more powerful. Also, we recommend the use of Mozilla as the
internet browser of choice. Netscape is
antiquated and most students currently use Mozilla or some other browser. In addition to these changes, the assignment
was reordered for ease of TA-student communication.
We added homepage creation
to the graphic design project for two reasons.
First, the assignment was a bit small without the additional task of
webpage design. Second, we feel that
webpage design will not be overlooked if it is grouped with other graphics and
presentation related topics. In addition
to the previous Rice webpage with suggestions for homepage creation, we give a
quick description of how to create a homepage.
For this assignment, we
inserted the Advanced Maple Topics Lab Problem 2 concerning period of a mass
following an elliptical orbit as a new test problem. We did this because the problem mainly deals
with unit conversion, and that is mainly covered in this assignment. The next change we made was to eliminate the
redundancy of verifying the gas constant for every value given in Felder and
Rousseau. This was accomplished by
reducing the number of verifications in Test Problem 2 to one additional value
from Lab Problem 4. We also eliminated
the attempt to symbolically integrate the equation from Test Problem 1. This is because the new version of Maple will
not evaluate this integral in a nice manner.
The old version calculated a much shorter result. In addition, this evaluation is not necessary
for the understanding of the problem.
Another alteration of this problem is to change the initial temperature
to 298.15 K from 300 K since the intention was to integrate over the entire
valid range of temperatures.
Our first change in this
assignment was to lop off Test Problem 2.
This problem involves simple unit conversion, which is not consistent
with the advanced Maple curriculum. Lab
Problem 2 was moved to the Basic Maple Techniques assignment as described in
that section. The major change in this
assignment is the introduction of a new lab problem involving a change of
variables and the solution of a differential equation. This technique is essential for CENG402 and
provides a bit more of a challenge for the advanced assignment.
Home | Maple Cheat Sheet | New
Assignment Order
Unix Review and Introduction to
Maple | Graphic Design
Basic Maple Techniques | Advanced Maple Topics
Project by: Scott Esterholm and Mark Pond
CENG 402
2005