Course Content and Outcomes Guides (CCOG)

CCOG for MTH 84 archive revision 201404

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Effective Term:
Fall 2014 through Summer 2017

Course Number:
MTH 84
Course Title:
Introduction to LaTeX
Credit Hours:
1
Lecture Hours:
10
Lecture/Lab Hours:
0
Lab Hours:
0

Course Description

Explores the power of LaTeX for use at school, home, or the workplace for mathematical documents and other applications. Audit available.

Addendum to Course Description

All software used in this course is freely available for every standard operating system.

Intended Outcomes for the course

Upon successful completion of the class a student will be able to:

  • successfully install LaTeX and its related components on a home/personal computer;
  • use LaTeX and various templates acquired from the course to compose Mathematical documents, presentations, and reports;
  • access CTAN and other resources to obtain additional LaTeX packages.

Course Activities and Design

Assessment must include:

  • weekly document assignments

Assessment may also include:

  • portfolio of templates (e.g. letter, homework assignment, etc.)
  • in-class group work
  • cumulative assignment
  • level-specific assignment (e.g. lab write-up for MTH 251)

Outcome Assessment Strategies

Addressing each course outcome:

  • successfully install LaTeX and its related components on a home/personal computer: students are required to submit a LaTeX document with its output. This establishes successful installation.
  • use LaTeX and various templates acquired from the course to compose Mathematical documents, presentations, and reports: Submitted weekly assignments are used to gauge this outcome.
  • access various resources, such as http://ctan.org, to obtain additional LaTeX packages: At least one assignment requires students to use online resources; explicit guidance is purposely omitted from that part of the lesson so that students will need to research and use these resources first hand.

Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)

  1. Set-up and compiling options
    • installing LaTeX and related software, and an integrated development environment
  2. Basics
    • inline and displayed math content
    • title, author, date, maketitle, fancyhdr
    • font sizes and styles, page sizes, line spacing (using geometry package)
    • itemize, enumerate
    • font modification: \bfseries, \itshape, color, etc.
    • interpreting .log files
    • fixing mistakes
    • commenting
    • online resources such as ctan and tex.stackexchange
  3. More advanced documents
    • advanced equations and alignment environments from the amsmath and mathtools packages
    • labeling and referencing equations
    • units with siunitx
    • hyperlinks in pdf files (using hyperref package)
    • multicols
    • sectioning commands, table of contents, list of figures, list of tables
    • new commands
    • beamer class for presentations
  4. Figures and tables
    • floats
    • tables, booktabs package
    • including pictures and figures (.bmp, .jpg, .eps, etc.)
    • captions (including customization with the caption package)
    • minipages
    • homemade graphics using either pgfplots, tikz, or pstricks
  5. Optional content
    • automation tools (e.g. arara)
    • new environments, counters, theorems
    • subfigure, subtable, longtable
    • installing new packages and updating existing packages
    • latex2html
    • refcheck (using refcheck package)
    • batch/bash files
    • bibliography (using biblatex or biber)
    • index and/or glossary