Hi,
I am a senior high school physics and maths teacher and I've just started using Mathcad in my classroom, having taken my students through the installation process and 2 basic tutorials designed for high school students. I personally have recently completed the PLMS4schools "Application Orientation" and "Working with units" courses.
I was hoping to have my students use it as a scratchpad for doing physics and maths problems, but have recently discovered a fairly significant inadequacy in this regard - Mathcad doesn't seem to have any feature that allows students to draw sketches "on the fly".
So many physics and maths problems require diagrams other than plots - think free body diagrams, electrical circuits, impulse-momentum, vectors, etc. In fact, I've seen several examples in the PLMS4schools courses of exercises where the problem is explained using a sketch of the forces on a beam - so how are these sketches produced?
Is the intention that they do these kind of things in another program (like Paint or Visio) and then insert them into the worksheet, or have I just not found the feature? If it does exist, there doesn't seem to be a lesson on it anywhere (I've searched the Learning Connector ad Knowledge Base for "Diagrams" "Sketch" and "Drawing" and nothing came up). A freehand sketch feature would be really useful.
If anyone has any tips on the best way for students to insert sketches and diagrams into their Mathcad worksheets, they would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Benson
