2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Tips and Tricks on Using LaTeX for Creating Teaching Materials—Perspectives From Two Engineering Faculty

Presented at Computers in Education Division (COED) Track 4.A

Professors spend significant time creating teaching materials such as lecture notes, handouts, homework/exercises, labs, and exams. Tools that professors use to create teaching materials include Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and LaTeX. Both Microsoft Word and Google Docs are what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) document programs whereas LaTeX is a typesetting system that uses a markup language to format plain text.

As compared to Microsoft Word and Google Docs, LaTeX is more modular, easier to create equations, allows programmatic control over typography and formatting, and separates content from the format. In the long term LaTeX can reduce the time and effort required to create teaching materials. For these reasons, the authors chose to use LaTeX to create teaching materials for their courses.

The authors will discuss how they take advantage of LaTeX's modularity, programmability, and typography to prepare their course materials. Some examples will be provided such as how LaTeX is used to create consistent looking syllabi and how it is used to turn on/off solutions in lecture handouts.

Authors

Dr. Julian Ly Davis http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4109-3904 University of Southern Indiana [biography]

Jul Davis is an Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, Indiana. He received his PhD in 2007 from Virginia Tech in Engineering Mechanics where he studied the vestibular organs in the inner ear using finite element models and vibration analyses. After graduating, he spent a semester teaching at a local community college and then two years at University of Massachusetts (Amherst) studying the biomechanics of biting in bats and monkeys, also using finite element modeling techniques. In 2010, he started his career teaching in all areas of mechanical engineering at the University of Southern Indiana. He loves teaching all of the basic mechanics courses, and of course his Vibrations and Finite Element Analysis courses.
Mr. Bradley Lane Kicklighter P.E. http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-2012-9317 University of Southern Indiana [biography]

Brad holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (1989) and an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University (2001).

His past work experience includes eleven years at Delphi (formerly Delco Electronics) as an Advanced Project Engineer, eleven years at Whirlpool Corporation as a Lead Engineer/Solution Architect, and three years at Ivy Tech Community College as an Instructor/Program Chair Pre-Engineering. Since 2015, he has been employed at the University of Southern Indiana as a Clinical Associate Professor of Engineering Technology.

He holds three patents, has served as an IEEE section officer since 2004, and has been a Licensed Professional Engineer in the State of Indiana since 2005.

Brad is the current chair of the ASEE Instrumentation Division.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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