@Scot Gould 

Yes, we use the same workaround as you point out. As you state most students will learn.

My experience is that the students struggling most with math also has most trouble ubderstanding the "programming logic" of Maple. For instance they meet an integral which doesn't compute (takes a long time), they know to put points in the expression, so they convert numbers to decimalpoint in the integrand, but it still doesn't compute. Since they struggle with math, they just assume that they did something wrong themselves and only the better students realize they need to put floating points in the limits.

So for the students who struggle most and likewise struggle with interpreting fractions it would be nice to globally set Maple to calculate all expressions as evalf.

@nm 

We're using Maple at my gymnasium (high school) for math, and especially students who have trouble in math also have trouble with using Maple. So for instance they sometimes has to compute an integral or some other computation, where either Maple can't calculate it exact or they get confused by the very long exact expressions Maple produces.

So for those students it would be easier if Maple just calculated approximately all the time, and displayed the results as floating point numbers, which are easy to interpret.