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.
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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.
