It's painful to read. Problem 2: "Find the matrix A describing the following linear transformation from R2 to R'2 : First rotate clockwise by π/6, then scale by a factor of 2, then reflect about the x2 axis." Anyone who programs video games recognizes that as a stack of transformations. You set up the matrix for the rotate, the scale, and the reflection (which is a scale of -1 on one axis). You multiply the matrices to get the result. This is a pain to do with pencil and paper. GPUs have hardware for it.
Books on graphics programming cover this problem. But they usually do it much better, with graphical examples. The presentation here is done very abstractly, without any motivation. Most of linear algebra has graphical representations. It takes a useful and relatively easy area of math and makes it harder.
This is apparently on purpose. The class description says:
The calculations are relatively simple once you understand what you need to compute, but it can take time to master the abstract concepts well enough to understand what that might be. The challenge in 201 (a calculus class) is usually how to finish a problem as the technical complications mount, whereas in 202 the challenge is often in seeing how to start the problem.
Right. In calculus, problems usually involve trying to integrate something, where you get stuck and need to transform the problem in some non-obvious way to make forward progress. It's puzzle-solving. In linear algebra, the actual operations are mostly matrix adds and multiplies. It's setting up the problem that's hard.
It's annoying to see this for a useful area of applied math. If you're headed for abstract algebra, where intuition breaks down, this approach might be useful. But if you want to use ordinary linear systems to get work done, which is common in engineering, it's not.
[1] https://www.math.princeton.edu/undergraduate/placement/MAT20...
[2] https://www.math.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/2018-04/M...