Software:

For me, the open source/creative commons ethic is a baseline for my teaching. The students we serve at COCC are often stretching all their resources to be at school creating new opportunities for themselves. In support of that I prefer, whenever possible, to use freely available materials and tools.

Software is one of the core tools in all disciplines in our world. In the sciences software is used to accomplish many tasks. One broad class of tools are markup languages. Among these is LaTeX (check out the link on how to pronounce this on the LaTeX page) which has many features in common with html (for building web pages) and other markup languages. Harvey Mudd is a wonderful engineering school in L.A. and their math department requires all homework problems to be turned in as LaTeX processed files. Here is their homework policy.

Software to perform a range of mathematical operations is also commonly used across all engineering and science disciplines. The most common commercial versions are Maple, Mathematica, and MatLab. MatLab is used at OSU-C but it is costly and even industrial employers are begining to convert to open source tools like Python and Jupyter. Python has a library which uses commands which are very similar to MatLab which is one reason we are using it.

Anaconda/Jupyter

Markdown/LaTeX
Documentation