Following a very useful comment from Chris, I have had the good fortune to check out the latest offering of Mathcad. It appears to have a much more intuitive interface, than previous versions; and once the more functional 2.0 version appears in the autumn, I will seriously consider purchasing my own copy (I suspect the O.U may not catch up and use this version, until much later).
I am liaising with my tutor, to find out if the O.U are going to use the new version of Mathcad in the future. One blockage I can see, is that the O.U course text is written, integrating the current version of Mathcad (the one I'm not keen on). So, I would surmise, that the O.U, won't swap to a new version, until they are due to change the current presentation of course material (which could be several years for MST121).
It won't stop me lobbying the O.U, regarding the new Mathcad version. I see maths software as essential for higher maths courses. It allows you to do lots of smaller but tedious calculations, in an instant, whilst in pursuit of a much larger and important solution.
I am currently reading a book by Richard Feynman, detailing his memoires, about the time that he was at Los Alamos, engineering the first atomic weapons. He tells of warehouses, full of student physicists and technicians, punching cards into mechanical counting machines and iterating the answers many times over. It used to take them about 4 months to tackle any particular problem, concerning the energy release of different atomic fission models. We have come such a long way.
On reading this tale, it did make me stop and think; that even though I was struggling for 3hrs, to plot a graph and do some calculations, with mathcad; doing it with just a pencil and paper, would have taken a very long time, indeed.
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