HELM - STACK workbooks: adding interactivity on vector calculus topics
Konstantina Zerva
The University of Edinburgh, UK
Abstract
HELM (Helping Engineers Learn Mathematics) is a collection of 50 workbooks developed by five English universities between 2002 and 2005. HELM resources cover the basic engineering mathematics and statistics teaching for first and second year mathematics courses for engineering undergraduates.
During the summers of 2020 and 2021, the universities of Edinburgh and Loughborough undertook an effort of embedding the HELM materials into STACK. The result was a collection of quizzes, each serving as interactive workbooks complete with textbook-style content, detailed worked examples, tasks of varying complexity, and practice questions. Almost 2/3 of the HELM workbooks have been embedded into STACK, mainly the ones covering the first-year engineering teaching. In the previous year, I was awarded funding through the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme at the university of Edinburgh, to continue the translation of HELM into STACK. The project was carried out during the summer of 2025 by two undergraduate interns, who mainly worked on 3 workbooks related to vector calculus.
This talk provides an update on the ongoing translation of the HELM workbooks into STACK. It highlights the developments that took place over the summer and shares the experiences of undergraduate students engaging with JSXGraph for the first time.