Author Archives: Matt Boelkins

Getting ready for Mathfest

At Mathfest, Chrissy Safranski and I will be leading a minicourse titled “Teaching Active Calculus using Runestone” that will introduce participants to the Runestone platform. Runestone is a Learning Engineering Analytics Platform that allows students to log in to their … Continue reading

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Welcome to the updated activecalculus.org

Welcome to the redesigned activecalculus.org, including this new location for the blog that was formerly hosted at https://opencalculus.wordpress.com/.

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Fall 2022 reminders and updates

A list of things you might find helpful if you are teaching or learning from APC, ACS, or ACM: + Updated HTML There have been minor updates to the HTML for APC and ACS. These are almost all tiny and … Continue reading

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A Calc 2 Teachalong

My wife is a professional knitter. She designs patterns, teaches classes and techniques, works at major events like Rhinebeck (think “yarn conferences”) and manages the social media for a yarn company and a yarn shop. Yarn folks often engage in … Continue reading

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Alternate ending: draft of a new Chapter 8

I’ve written a rough draft of a very different version of Chapter 8 for Active Calculus (single variable), and I am interested in feedback from users. TL;DR version: I have come to think that the Taylor series representations of the … Continue reading

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PreTeXt, Runestone, and the exciting future of open textbooks

In late June, I was fortunate to attend a week-long UTMOST workshop in Ann Arbor that brought together education researchers, PreTeXt developers, Runestone developers, and textbook authors. The newest part to me was learning more about Runestone. Runestone Academy was … Continue reading

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Active Calculus is Turning 10

“The days are long but the decades are short.” That’s one of my favorite quotes about the nature of time and life, written in 2015 by a then-30-year-old! Ten years ago in early August 2012, I wrote this post that … Continue reading

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A (partial) mastery-grading approach for Active Prelude to Calculus

For the Fall 2020 Pandemic Semester, I taught two sections of GVSU’s 5-credit MTH 124: Functions and Models, our calculus-prep course. This is the course for which I wrote Active Prelude to Calculus, and this was my first time getting … Continue reading

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Screencasts for Active Prelude to Calculus

My GVSU colleague Mandy Calvillo has developed a fantastic resource for students and instructors using Active Prelude: a YouTube library of 122 (!) short videos that offer additional perspective and explanation on key ideas in the text. The videos are … Continue reading

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Back to school updates for Active Prelude, Active Single, and Active Multi

Here is my just-in-time post for back to school, Fall 2020 Edition. Overall: The two main things to know about the Active Calculus textbooks (Active Prelude to Calculus (APC), Active Calculus Single Variable (ACS), and Active Calculus Multivariable (ACM)) are … Continue reading

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