No prior knowledge of Maple software is required in this course. It can act as an electronic "back of the book" answer service for most of the end results of exercises and problems you will be asked to do, and you will be allowed to use it on all quizzes and tests. It is the careful presentation and communication of all the hand steps in the resolution of any exercise that is the important thing these assessments will try to encourage, so that you acquire an understanding of the ideas and concepts, as opposed to focusing on the mechanical steps which are part of the problem resolution process (differentiation, integration, algebra, solving equations).
In the past I would assign group Maple work on mostly problems from the textbook approached with templates or simply as one step exercises to check the answer to serve two purposes. First and foremost to expose students to Maple so they can be empowered to step up their learning and so that they are able to acquire enough user familiarity with it to be able to know their hand work is on track, which is what answers "in the back of the book" do. Second it would force everyone to interact with at least one or two (or even three) other students in the class sections I teach in order to have peers with whom they can consult for homework or test preparation. Resubmissions were encouraged to get full credit on every assignment, if necessary with my help in person to help correct errors. Grading was the least important aspect of Maple assignments, and it was easy to get full credit for ten percent of the grade budget.
In the age of COVID-19, with an online only format for the two classes I teach, it seems reasonable to rethink this approach. The choice of Maple activities will be rethought as well, and only as pass/fail or even ungraded activities that will not contribute to the course grade. It is more important simply to begin using Maple so you are familiar enough with basic operations needed for this topic.
The context sensitive menus and various Expression, Common Symbols, Calculus and Matrix palettes enable one to click your way to success without having to know syntax and commands. With a bit of playing around, it is easy to create the expressions and equations we need to work with using the palettes, and choose from the context sensitive menus to accomplish whatever we will need. Some template command files will help you do more than a one step calculation, but will only require editing the input numbers and expressions and re-executing.