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Calculus&Mathematica is a complete, modern calculus course
developed recently at the University of Illinois and Ohio State University. The course,
which is based on an interactive electronic text written as a series of Mathematica
notebooks, fully integrates the numeric, symbolic and graphic capabilities of Mathematica
as tools to explore calculus concepts, methods and applications. As such, it differs
markedly in content emphasis and organizational style as well as in its underlying
pedagogy from "traditional" calculus courses. Calculus&Mathematica
(C&M) is a college-level course that is taught at a number universities and high
schools throughout the country. The goal of this module is to familiarize you with
the Calculus&Mathematica course as well as how it is taught and the way in
which student performance is evaluated.
Because you are a mathematics teacher who is familiar with calculus, the best way to
achieve this goal is to have you go through some sample lessons in the course and do some
homework from these lessons just as C&M students do. This will not be as boring as it
might sound because, as noted above, Calculus&Mathematica presents calculus in
a manner that is usually quite different from the way that you and we learned it (or
taught it) before. Some of these differences may please you as welcome changes from
traditional approaches; others may annoy or worry you. In either case, we think that they
will prompt you to rethink and perhaps modify your views of how calculus can and should be
taught.
We will also have you look at some sample homework from high school students and then
look at how it was graded. That will help you to understand the homework grading
philosophy for the course.
After this, we will ask you to grade one "real" homework set for one or our
current C&M students.
Although this module was initially developed for high school mathematics teachers who
served as local coordinators for the Calculus&Mathematica netMATH Distance
Education Program in their schools, we believe that any mathematics teacher will find it
to be a good, thought provoking introduction to the content and pedagogy of the C&M
course and, more generally, to the recent calculus reform movement. |
