Student(s):
Toby Jones
Dates of Involvement:
Sept 2009 – June 2010
Faculty Advisor(s):
John Flynt
Graduate Mentor:
Calculus Exploration Lab Development
Background
Many students first entering college are required to take a calculus course in their first year. It is a required course for most engineering disciplines, and many of the concepts will come up later in their studies. Research has shown (Mary Nelson 2009) that students have a exceptionally high failure rates in this basic course, as high as 40%. Much of this is due to not understanding the basic concepts on their own and even students who have passed the course don’t grasp how much of what they learnt relates outside of the problems they were required to solve. In order to address this problem we want to create a series of labs that will allow the students to work with the concepts while building a application that will familiarize them with the ideas and how they can be related to a problem. By placing them in a model where they are participating in the learning actively they will be able to better understand and retain these ideas. For this purpose we polled the Professors at the University who have been teaching this material and recovered a list of six concepts that students have a hard time understanding throughout the course.
Application Development
My part of the project is to develop applications around these six areas that the students can then recreate themselves and expand upon. The six areas are
- Velocity and Position from Acceleration
- Related Rates
- Areas under the graph
- Growth and Decay
- Fluid Force
- Pumping liquid from containers
The labs will allow the students to see these principles in action creating simulations that actual show how these concepts work in real situations. They can then take this understanding and use the application to build upon this knowledge.
Collaboration
I will be working with the other team members to make sure these applications can be easily recreated by the students they are intended for, and then measuring their effectiveness when used by students in conjunction with a course they are taking.
