Abstract
It is not possible to achieve the objectives and skills of a program in economics, at the secondary and undergraduate levels, without resorting to graphic illustrations. In this way, the use of educational software has been increasingly recognized as a useful tool to promote students’ motivation to deal with, and understand, new economic concepts. Current digital technology allows students to work with a large number and variety of graphics in an interactive way, complementing the theoretical results and the so often used paper and pencil calculations. The computer algebra system Mathematica is a very powerful software that allows the implementation of many interactive visual applications. Thanks to the symbolic and numerical capabilities of Mathematica, these applications allow the user to interact with the graphical and analytical information in real time. However, Mathematica is a commercially distributed application which makes it difficult for teachers and students to access. The main goal of this paper is to present a new dynamic and interactive tool, created with Mathematica and available in the Computable Document Format. This format allows anyone with a computer to use, at no cost, the PES(Linear)-Tool, even without an active Wolfram Mathematica license. The PES(Linear)-Tool can be used as an active learning tool to promote better student activity and engagement in the learning process, among students enrolled in socio-economic programs. This tool is very intuitive to use which makes it suitable for less experienced users.
Highlights
The use of educational software has been increasingly recognized as a useful tool to promote students’ motivation to deal with, and understand, new concepts in different study fields
Current digital technology allows students to work with a large number and variety of graphics, in an interactive way, complementing the theoretical results and the so often used paper and pencil calculations
The F-Tool concept, which was first presented in the 1st National Conference on Symbolic Computation in Education and Research (Portugal 2012), where it was distinguished with the Timberlake Award for Best Article by a Young Researcher, was created as an interactive Mathematica notebook, to explore the concept of real functions and their graphics, by analyzing the effects caused by changing the values of the parameters of general analytical expressions [28]
Summary
The use of educational software has been increasingly recognized as a useful tool to promote students’ motivation to deal with, and understand, new concepts in different study fields (see, for instance, [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]). It is recognized that some economic concepts can be more understood when the students work with a large number and variety of graphics in an interactive way, with the support of the appropriate technology, the use of computer algebra systems is rare and under-studied in economics education (we thank an anonymous referee for this observation). The current paper intends to present a new interactive and dynamic mathematical tool for the study of the price elasticity of supply concept, the new PES(Linear)-Tool (see Supplementary Materials), which allows students to change a function’s parameter values and get the analytical and graphical results in real time. Basic Economic Concepts This section introduces some basic concepts related to the price elasticity of supply
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