Educational Software
The original concept of Project Athena was that there would be course-specific software developed to use in conjunction with teaching. Today, computers are most frequently used for "horizontal" applications such as e-mail, word processing, communications, and graphics.
The big impact of Athena on education has been the integration of third party applications into courses. MATLAB and Maple (especially the former) are integrated into large numbers of science and engineering classes. Faculty expect that their students have access to and know how to use these applications for projects and homework assignments, and some have used the MATLAB platform to rebuild the courseware that they had originally built using the X Window System.
More specialized third-party software are used on Athena for more discipline-specific work. Rendering software for architecture and computer graphics classes, molecular modeling software for chemistry, chemical engineering, and material science courses, and professional software used by chemical engineers in industry, are important components of a number of MIT classes in various departments.
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“An educational method that shall have liberty as its basis must intervene to help the child to a conquest of liberty. That is to say, his training must be such as shall help him to diminish as much as possible the social bonds which limit his activity.”
—Maria Montessori (1870–1952)