The following tutorials are from the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the United States Air Force Academy. At USAFA, they are used for faculty training purposes. At Carroll, we use these tutorials throughout the curriculum to help students become proficient in the basics of Mathematica.

The following descriptions are taken from http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfms/mma/intros.htm . For other Mathematica resources at USAFA, see: http://www.usafa.af.mil/dfms/mma.htm.

• Basic Concepts Part 1 (40KB)
• The first of three interactive tutorials used to train our new instructors on the use of Mathematica. The notebook covers basic navigation within Mathematica notebooks, performing calculations, the definition and usage of functions, and some built-in algebraic functions. It also includes a summary of common pitfalls encountered by novice users of Mathematica. The tutorial takes the average new instructor less than 45 minutes to accomplish.
• Basic Concepts Part 2 (46KB)
• The second of three interactive tutorials used to train our new instructors on the use of Mathematica. The notebook covers built-in functions, Mathematica's Help System, the use of Mathematica for basic single variable differential and integral calculus, and some more advance syntax issues. The tutorial takes the average new instructor less than one hour to accomplish.
• Basic Concepts Part 3 (70KB)
• The third of three interactive tutorials used to train our new instructors on the use of Mathematica. Since illustrations can be a most powerful pedagogical tool, this notebook provides a comprehensive coverage of Mathematica's graphics and plotting capabilities. It starts off easy with basic plotting functions and common parameters used to customize the results. It then progresses to a describe a wide range of different graphics including parametric plots, 3D plots, contour maps, and vector fields. The notebook concludes with a discussion on how to build and use animations and how to define one's own custom graphics functions. The tutorial takes the average new instructor about two hours to accomplish all the objectives, however, the basic concepts can be covered in less than one hour.