2⁵ Problems for STEM Education

Valery Ochkov is Professor at Moscow Power Engineering Institute (Technical University – MPEI – www.mpei.ru) in the Department of Theoretical Basics of Thermal Engineering (TOT), founder and general manager of Trieru (www.trie.ru), an engineering consulting firm that develops simulators and analytical software for the power industry. He also works at Joint Institute for High Temperatures (www.jiht.ru) of the Russian Academy of Sciences and at Moscow High School at MPEI. He is a member of the working group on thermodynamics of the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS) and PTC Mathcad Community (https://community.ptc.com).He has authored more than 25 books in Russian and English and numerous journal articles on the use of math software for solving the problems in thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer and fluid dynamics. Professor Ochkov is one of the creators of WaterSteamPro™, an application for simulating thermophysical properties of water and steam and also a co-creator of web-calculations for the Elsevier/Knovel website.

". . . the book can serve as a nice manual on the Mathcad software, and it can be very useful to teachers and lecturers looking for new examples to enrich their presentations, which is especially important nowadays with necessity to employ the remote teaching and distance learning."– Technometrics, Volume 62, 2020 - Issue 4"Ochkov (Moscow Power Engineering Institute) packs a lot of information into a single book. The author's purpose is to present 32 "content rich" problems—or studies, as he refers to them—for students to solve. Each study includes areas of mathematics, physics, IT, art, and even creating a website. The narrative part of each study reads well, though a few may be overly long. The main software to be used is Mathcad, with copious examples provided in each study. Some studies are relatively short and fairly accessible, appropriate for use with lower-division (or even advanced high school) students, while others are definitely more advanced and complex. The primary reason to use this book is that it offers a range of problems, providing options that can be tailored to work for a particular class or group situation. This reader applauds the approach of presenting science as a system of interconnected information shared across many disciplines. True, this is not the current approach adopted in many traditional curricula. Yet, instructors could use this book as source material to create tailored, content-rich assignments. This reader can also envision assigning some of the problems to be undertaken in a group setting followed by presentations to the class."– Choice Review, D. B. Mason, Albright College

• 1. Formulas for calculations Or Chekhov's gun.  2. Swan, Crayfish and Pike Or Scalar and vector in computer calculations.  3. The Gold Bug Or Roman-Arab cryptography.  4. Solvers Or The Mathcad magnificent seven.  5. Guess the Image Or The Matrix Game.  6. How much Or The old problem in a new way.  7. Catenary Or The Fifth Element.  8. Live kinematic schemes Or Arm of Hella.  9. Celestial Mechanics Or Kepler's watch.  10. Recursion Or A knight's tour.  11. Yes-No in Mathcad Or Boole’s origami.  12. Fuzzy sets Or Optimal Fire Bucket.  13. The journey of a circle in a triangle, and of a triangle in a hollow Or a self-directed computer director.  14. Interpolation, extrapolation and fitting Or Lies, damned lies and statistics.  15. Go there, knowing where to go Or New Swiss watches.  16. Heads or tails Or A Three-way duel in Monte Carlo.  17. Geese are flying Or The Problem of fishermen and fish.  18. Alphabetical puzzle Or Help yourself so that the computer helps you!.  19. Seven computational curves Or Apollonius bicycle and Apollo guitar.  20. Journey from home to school on the Fermat route Or The second optical property of hyperbola.  21. Optimization of potential energy Or Curves of the second order in statistics.  22. Parallel computing Or Put yourself in order!.  23. How to calculate a ship Or How you name a boat, is how it will sail.  24. How to calculate a Rocket Or … "and on Mars will blossom apple trees".  25. Hybrid calculations on the computer Or One more about a cone.  26. Funicular Polygon in Static, Kinematics and Dynamics Or Isaac Newton vs Joseph Louis Lagrange.  27. BHL or Application for the Ig Nobel Prize.  28. Tomography = IT + Mathematics + Physics + Biology Or Worker-peasant graphics.  29. A New Ellipse Or Math Porcelain Service.  30. What lies behind a simplified formula Or Hybrid calculation of the Otto cycle.  31. Mad Chain Or Physical and Mathematical Informatics.  32.  STEM-education Or Science Fiction.