Users already familiar with Maple programming, polygon plotting and animations may wish to browse the examples of Lesson 1 only briefly and then quickly proceed to Lesson 2, where the MathClass package tools are introduced. In the course of this study we will find that there is an incredible variety of problems of this nature and that there are techniques for developing families of them from basic contexts. In this introduction to the subject we will primarily restrict our attention to problems which can be analyzed with the non-calculus mathematics and basic science studied in middle and high school. However, since part of what we will be doing is generating new problems from old we must be prepared to find ourselves formulating questions in that vocabulary whose solution requries new tools. We will celebrate when we do for the quest for problems not solvable within a science is the most basic process in by which it is extended.
Problem solving is about marshalling the intellectual tools at our disposal to attack a problem.
The expected result of a serious attack on a problem is a contribution to its solution. A contribution may well fall short of a complete solution but it will always present one's formulation of the problem, one's approach to analyzing the problem, and the results of one's analysis. In keeping with our visual approach at least one of these components will contain elements of a visual nature. Our primary tool will be Maple. More over this language is extensible which means that, like any natural language, it can be used to define new words which the program can recognize and new symbols which it can manipulate.