Student Resources: Calculus Projects

Instructors in the mathematics department care deeply about student learning. Over the years, many instructors have made efforts, either individually or in groups, to enhance student engagement in our core courses, especially the calculus sequence. Included below is information about a few recent initiatives that have focused on active, project-based, and inquiry-based learning in calculus. An overview of ten years of these initiatives (2009-2019) can be found in this paper, published in PRIMUS.

CAPABLE: Calculus Acquisition through Problem and Activity Based Learning

This site was created in 2009 by Gary Fowler, Sommer Gentry, Amy Ksir and Will Traves. We provided instructors with a set of short, 1-2 day projects that could be plugged into the existing Calculus 1 and Calculus 2 courses. By making these available we were able to encourage a large group of instructors to try this kind of teaching.

Project Based Calculus II

This site was created in 2016 by Justin Allman, Noble Hetherington III, Amy Ksir and Megan Selbach-Allen. Our goal was to gather a set of projects that would have a longer arc, have a hands-on component, and encourage students to develop the ideas of the course themselves.

Inquiry Based Calculus

In 2018, Amy Ksir and Daphne Skipper collected a set of inquiry-based materials to use for Calculus I. Our goal was to replicate the successes of deeper learning in Calculus II, and add structure supporting student buy-in.