Education A P L in T e a c h i n g Howard A. Peelle Springfield Technical Community College Mathematics Department Springfield, MA Professor James McDonald offers a 3-credit Linear Algebra course with a 1-credit, 3-hour computer lab. About 25 electrical engineering students enroll in the spring semester - most of whom have had BASIC and/or PASCAL. APL is used to illustrate fundamental concepts of linear algebra. The books include a standard linear algebra text, and Peelle's APL: An Introduction (especially for the lab); Helzer's functions are available in a workspace for reference. Class notes, examples, homework problems and solutions are also available to students as workspaces and files on hard disk. Examinations consist of two parts: a theoretical part is completed in class, and a computational part is completed in the laboratory using a combination of student-defined functions and canned functions provided by the professor. Machines are IBM PCs with STSC's APL*PLUS/PC version 6.0. The course has been offered twice in previous years. Plans are to offer it again in spring 1988, possibly using APL on Macintoshes. Graphics and windowing would be especially attractive for showing matrix manipulations such as linear transformations and similar matrices side-by-side with their geometric representations. Professor Hilton Abbott and several others in the Math. Department are designing a new curriculum for adults who lack basic arithmetic skills. Starting with the assumption that adults who are deficient in arithmetic cannot be taught like children, they are exploring alternative teaching strategies, including the use of APL. For these students, APL will be new, powerful, real and practical as well as an embodiment of basic mathematical ideas. It is hoped that a course planned for fall 1987 - will afford an opportunity for them to solidify their mathematical understandings while rebuilding confidence, competence and positive attitudes. - just the first nine chapters, but the second part of the book has been useful for the better students who want to move ahead. The overall approach involves ensuring the students' familiarity with fundamental functions, then supplying partially developed programs as aids, then writing programs of their own. The chief difficulty is getting students to forget programming style instilled by other languages and to think in APL terms. Unfortunately, in the seven times the course has been taught, only one known student has been employed using APL. University of New Brunswick Faculty of Administration Fredericton, NB, Canada E3B 5A3 Professor Edward Y.H. Lin has used APL in teaching OR/MS (Operations Research/Management Science) related courses because of APL's flexibility and power in manipulating vectors and matrices in complex ways and also because its interactivity creates a user-friendly atmosphere. Graduate students and seniors are usually introduced to APL primitive functions in the first two weeks of the semester; then they are requested to define functions for some elementary operations such as pivoting, which is helpful in understanding the Simplex iterations in linear programming; these defined functions can then serve as stepping stones to advanced topics - for instance, a function which finds the shortest path in a given graph is useful in locating the single median or vertex center in facility location problems. Lower level undergraduate students are required to solve problems using available defined functions; for instance, a generalized dynamic programming algorithm coded recursively can be easily modified to solve problems such as the stage-coach problem, knapsack (cargoloading) problem, reliability problem, etc. Additional student projects and theses are also done in VS APL, which is supported by the university's Computing Center under control of VSPC and includes a mercurion page printer for good quality APL printouts. With APL keyboards available on virtually every terminal on campus, students generally express high interest in using APL to solve 0R/MS problems. n O - ¢. _ _ Worcester State College 486 Chandler Street Worcester, MA 01602-25997 For four years, Professor Loren Gould (Department of Natural and Earth Sciences) has taught the course "Higher Level Programming in APL" as part of the Math-Computer Science Master's program at Worcester State College. Enrollment has averaged almost 20 in the fall and spring semesters. Students are usually mathematically inclined, and about onethird to one-half are foreign students (mostly from the Near East and Southeast Asia) and Hispanics. They now use IBM PCs recently purchased by the college, instead of timesharing on a CDC machine in Boston previously. The textbook used is Peelle's APL: An Introduction. T h e course basically covers A P L Quote Q u a d 18 4 June 1988

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