<p>mathinokc - Thanks! I had one question for you since you have experience with the UIUC net math course - would you recommend it and how long does this take to complete?</p>
<p>My daughter felt like the time consuming part of the UIUC course was debugging her Mathematica code. 
She’d never used Mathematica before the course and didn’t have much programming experience (a little logo many years before).</p>
<p>I think it’s a good course, as long as you realize what it is – more engineering/computational than pure math. You do have to code in Mathematica for the course, which we viewed as a plus.</p>
<p>She ended up doing the vast majority of the course in about 2 months while preparing for AP exams. She had to be pretty diligent to finish that quickly. I think spreading the course over a semester is reasonable and would probably require 3-5 hours a week.</p>
<p>We found the people at UIUC fairly responsive when she had questions (meaning within a day), both about the mathematics and Mathematica.</p>
<p>Exams do have to be proctored and seemed reasonably well-aligned with the coursework.</p>
<p>The easiest and cheapest way to do it is to download Mathematica and the MathEverywhere courseware over the internet, rather than waiting for disks to arrive. Know that both are additional costs over the cost of the course (they’re equivalent to buying books, since there is no physical textbook for the course).</p>
<p>I misread the website and thought we shouldn’t enroll her until she was ready to start. However, there’s some paperwork required that you need school signatures on, etc., and then you can supply a start date. That caused an initial delay for us.</p>
<p>One interesting thing about the UIUC courses is that you can model ideas within Mathematics - something that you can’t do in most regular calc courses unless they have a lab component. They definitely aren’t theory-based courses though they do have a moderate amount. I found the courseware on an FTP server several years ago and downloaded a bunch of notebooks - I think that they were development versions of the courseware.</p>
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<p>For UC admission purposes, math and foreign language are effectively looked at in terms of level completed, so completion of precalculus and calculus already suffices to indicate four or more years of math.</p>
<p>It is best to complete the entire sequence to get full credit and placement against the course in college, to avoid having to partially repeat the course. If repeating is necessary due to having only partial coverage, it may be well worth considering taking the honors course in college, if an honors course is available.</p>
<p>Calc class using Mathematica? isn’t that like a running class using a golf cart?</p>
<p>1/2 :-)</p>
<p>turbo93 --</p>
<p>:-)</p>
<p>They just ask different questions than they would if you didn’t have mathematica. However, you don’t have Mathematica during the tests, so it’s a blended course. </p>
<p>Keep in mind, too, that we’re talking about multi-variable, where visualizing curves in 3D is really important.</p>