I am speaking in a contributed paper session at Mathfest today on the teaching and learning of calculus. If you’d like to see the slides from my presentation, they can be found at http://faculty.gvsu.edu/boelkinm/Mathfest.2012.pdf.
Where have we come from and where are we going?
While on sabbatical during the winter semester of 2012, I began drafting a free, open-source calculus text. I undertook the project in part because I felt like there wasn’t an activity-driven text available, as well as because I don’t think anyone should make millions by selling a calculus text.
The book that is underway is different from most existing texts in at least the following ways:
– the text will be free for download by students and instructors in .pdf format;
– due to the electronic format, graphics are in full color and there are live html links to java applets;
– the text will (eventually) be open source — interested instructors can gain access to the original source files upon request;
– the style of the text requires students to be active learners … there are very few worked examples in the text, with there instead being 3-4 activities per section that engage students in connecting ideas, solving problems, and developing understanding of key calculus ideas;
– each section begins with motivating questions, a brief introduction, and a preview activity, all of which are designed to be read and completed prior to class;
– the exercises are few in number and challenging in nature.
The interested user should know at least the following things before adopting the text:
– this is very much a work in progress; the materials have not yet been piloted or reviewed. I began the project essentially in January 2012. I am learning about a variety of key issues as the work progresses.
– there is not a traditional set of exercises included; for now, it is essential to have access to WeBWorK or some other source of routine problems.
– I have not yet completed materials for integral calculus; these are currently in progress (in collaboration with two of my colleagues), with the goal of having a usable draft of the material for integral calculus in time for Winter 2012.
While I think the text could be used in place of a traditional differential calculus text for the coming semester, a more realistic alternative might be to use it as a supplemental text for students, or to just use the activities workbook: the text is arranged so that all of the activities are embedded in the text, but can also be compiled in a separate document that provides students room to work. An instructor could use as many or few of the activities as she found useful.
See the page on my website devoted to the text, or this earlier post, where you can find a link to download a sample chapter of the text (which includes the table of contents).
I will be using the blog as a place to post user feedback and gain further ideas/suggestions/edits through the comments that readers and users of the text provide, and hopefully this site will become home for a community of users who decide to use the text in some way. I’ll also, of course, post updates regarding how the project is progressing.
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Project CAPABLE at USNA
Several professors at the US Naval Academy have an ongoing project of developing in-class and out-of-class activities and projects for students. CAPABLE stands for Calculus Acquisition through Project and Activity Based Learning. Check them out at https://sites.google.com/site/temporarycapablesite/, including the link to “syllabus by day”, for a host of possible activities and projects.
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Tagged activities, free, projects, resources
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Talk at Mathfest: “Toward a Freer Calculus”
I am speaking at Mathfest in Madison, WI, this Friday, August 3, at 1:45 in Meeting Room Q, as part of the contributed paper session on Teaching or Learning Calculus.
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Sample Chapter of Active Calculus
In preparation for having some people pilot the text for differential calculus this fall, I am in the process of some final editing before posting the first four chapters of the text. For now, you can find chapter 1 (along with the table of contents and preface) at http://gvsu.edu/s/dY. Alternatively, the link is posted on the portion of my web page devoted to the free and open calculus project.
Geogebra and Marc Renault’s calculus applets
One of my favorite programs is Geogebra. I discovered it years ago when one of my students was submitting superior graphics in a geometry class in typeset work; I asked her what software she was using and how she found it. She said “Geogebra. I just googled ‘free geometry software’.”
Duh.
Geogebra keeps getting better. Still free. If you haven’t tried it, you can do so and learn more at http://geogebra.org/cms/.
At the Joint Math Meetings in Boston in January 2012, I met Marc Renault of Shippensburg University. He was presenting a poster on his work with Geogebra in which he has used the program to create a library of applets for calculus I. You can find the library at http://webspace.ship.edu/msrenault/GeoGebraCalculus/GeoGebraCalculusApplets.html; I’ve linked to several of these applets in the calculus text I’m writing, taking advantage of the .pdf format to have live links for students to follow.
Posted in Resources, Software
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Project MOSAIC and M-casts
Last week I had the privilege of dropping in on part of the MAA PREP Workshop at Calvin College that was led by Randy Pruim (Calvin), Nick Horton (Smith), Eric Marland (Appalachian State), and Danny Kaplan (Macalester) that was connected to their ongoing Project MOSAIC (http://mosaic-web.org/). The focus of their project is promoting more modeling, statistics, and computation in the teaching of mathematics; the emphasis of the workshop was on promoting a modeling perspective particularly in calculus (more on the workshop is available at http://prep2012.mosaic-web.org/).
A great resource to investigate is their growing collection of “M-casts”, which are something between screencasts and TED Talks, with lots of different great ideas: http://test.causeweb.org/wiki/mosaic/index.php/Mcast-schedule.
Welcome
It’s a long story to get to here. Perhaps in some subsequent posts I’ll fill in the backstory; but for now, here’s where I am.
From January through April 2012 I was on sabbatical from my regular post as a professor of mathematics at Grand Valley State University, during which time I drafted a free, open source calculus text for differential calculus. The main purpose of this blog is to create a forum where people interested in the text can share comments, feedback, ideas, and resources for the betterment of this text. Along the way, hopefully we will collectively contribute to making more and better free resources available to students of calculus, and more and better free and open source calculus materials available to instructors.
