The workshop leaders Neil Challis and Harry Gretton work in the Sheffield Hallam Engineering Maths team, providing service teaching to a large number of courses to students with an increasing diversity of backgrounds. Traditional methods of delivering the required curriculum were failing, and a new integrated technological approach was developed. Thus students also have access to email and the Internet. The teaching team is working towards a problem-based approach. Technology challenges the curriculum in that specification of curriculum content is no longer enough.
Technology also challenges assessment .
Traditional closed-book examinations which test memory are undermined by calculators to such an extent that some boards ban their use. The first point to be made is that students have to learn to talk to the machines correctly. This takes about a week. Equations can be entered, named, tabulated and graphed, and facilities are available to find roots, extrema, slopes and area. Expressions such as the formula for radius of curvature can be built up and shown graphically in relation to the original curve.