Math Everywhere Courseware Series
©1999 Math Everywhere, Inc.

The Structure of the Lessons and Mathematica Notebooks.

The General idea of using an MEI interactive lesson

The layout of the lessons

Each interactive lesson is composed of four parts:
Basics: For the basic new ideas
Tutorials: For sample uses of the basic ideas
Give It a Try: For problems for you to do by computer or otherwise. Doing problems from this section is how you learn in MEI courseware. The Give It a Try problems are the heart of the courses.
Literacy Sheet: For problems you should be able to handle away from the computer after you have completed your assigned  Give It a Try problems.  These are the things you can always do on napkins while drinking coffee.

The Basics and Tutorials comprise the text.  This is where students go to see what the problems are about, what the mathematics is, and how it works.
The Give It a Try's are the homework problems.  At the beginning of this adventure, students didn't have home computers, so calling it homework would have been a lie.

Navigating Mathematica Notebooks

When you open a Mathematica notebook, you'll very likely see cell brackets on the right hand edge of the window.  Whenever there's a double width bracket, there's stuff hidden inside that grouping.  You need to be able to open and close those brackets to see what's there.  All you do is move the cursor over the outer bracket and double click (or right click).  You can reclose them the same way.  You'll know when your cursor is in the right place for that because it will change its shape to something like |<--.  Put that vertical line right over the bracket you want to open or close.