This is the summary of a presentation given at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, January 10-13, 1996, Orlando, Florida.

A first abstract algebra course often serves as the student's introduction to the power of abstract definitions. However, the importance of the concrete and specific can get lost in the abstraction. This presentation describes a set of collaborative exercises written for a first abstract algebra course. Through these exercises, students were led to think of groups concretely as groups of symmetries. Some exercises used computations with examples to help students to hypothesize key theorems before those theorems were introduced in lecture.

Sharon E. Persinger, Bronx Community College, City University of New York