The SCHOL Project
Using mathematical software to enhance undergraduate education
In 1992 several faculty members at the University of Maryland, College Park, embarked on an effort to modernize the sophomore-level Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE) course by incorporating a mathematical software system into the curriculum. This effort came to be known as the SCHOL project, an acronym for the developers: Garrett Stuck, Kevin Coombes, Brian Hunt, John Osborn, and Ron Lipsman. Later, Jonathan Rosenberg joined the project team, and still later, two other colleagues joined from other universities: Larry Lardy from Syracuse and Donald Outing from the US Military Academy. (Also, Coombes and Stuck left the group. And unfortunately, John Osborn passed away in 2011.) The project resulted in a full-fledged supplementary text, which has been adopted here at the University of Maryland and a number of other universities. The supplement comes in three flavors — MATLAB, Mathematica, and Maple. The current editions have copyright dates of 2012, 2008, and 2009, respectively.
Much more information about the SCHOL project and SCHOL books is available from another website.
Offshoots of the SCHOL project have produced several other books on mathematical software for undergraduates:
- A Guide to MATLAB, for beginners and experienced users, published by Cambridge University Press. This book is currently in its third edition (2014).
- Multivariable Calculus with MATLAB, with applications to geometry and physics, Springer, 2017.
- The Mathematica Primer, published by Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Multivariable Calculus and Mathematica, with applications to geometry and physics, Springer, 1998 (reprinted in paperback or as an ebook).