The SCHOL Project
University of Maryland, College Park

The SCHOL project is a collaboration started originally by Kevin Coombes, Brian Hunt, Ron Lipsman, John Osborn and Garrett Stuck, all on the faculty of the Mathematics Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. The goal of SCHOL (an acronym formed with the first letter of the last names of the five originators) was to enhance the undergraduate math curriculum by introducing mathematical software into undergraduate courses in a meaningful way.

The project began in 1992 with the introduction of Mathematica into the sophomore level Ordinary Differential Equations course. Since then, the project has resulted in supplementary textbooks, which enrich the sophomore ODE course by using one of Mathematica, Maple, or MATLAB. These were published by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. SCHOL has also produced general purpose Mathematica and MATLAB primers, published by Cambridge University Press.

Drs. Coombes and Stuck have left the project and, sadly, Dr. Osborn has passed away. Also, Jonathan Rosenberg has joined the group and Larry Lardy of Syracuse University and Donald Outing of the US Military Academy have collaborated on the most recent Maple (resp., Mathematica) versions of the ODE materials. A history and more detailed description of the SCHOL project may be found in an article published in a special edition of the Journal of Numerical Analysis, Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

The CLeaR project, an offshoot of the SCHOL project, is a collaboration among Kevin Coombes, Ron Lipsman and Jonathan Rosenberg to introduce Mathematica into the sophomore Multivariable Calculus course.

The newest project, an offshoot of CLeaR, is a forthcoming book by Ron Lipsman and Jonathan Rosenberg on multivariable calculus using MATLAB. This book is quite comprehensive and includes all the standard multivariable calculus topics as well as many applications to geometry and physics and a discussion of numerical algorithms.

Detailed information about these projects is available by clicking the links below or the icons on the left.