Calculus Lite

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

WeBWork at UML

Well, over a year later and now we have WeBWork at UML. One problem is the occasional down time the our IT people are trying to eliminate. Overall, I think it's great in spite of a steep learning curve.

http://webwork.uml.edu/webwork2/

Thursday, December 28, 2006

WeBWork

Haven't posted in a while. Big news since then has been Webwork (http://webwork.math.rochester.edu/). Used it in the Fall 2006 semester and found it very useful. Am negotiating to get it at UML.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

CBL

I got a CBL unit and one of my students is working on some ideas for it. One of the first things that I assumed we could do is monior the temperature of a cup of coffee for a while and then do a regression to extract the ambient temperature. That doesn't seems to be quite as simple as I thought since the regression model A+ B C^t doesn't seem to be available on the TI-84. Or is it...?

Getting the motion sensor soon - there are lots of things that can be done with it.

Saturday, March 25, 2006

In and Out for this summer's Calculus Summer Institute

In:

infinite series
Transcendental Functions
Derivative without limits (Monthly article)
Canine calculus
TI Navigator
TI CBL

Out:

Cardiac output
Slope fields

Saturday, July 09, 2005

cheat sheet

Just finished the first summer institute in calculus for Focus on Math. It went well

One thing that was suggested for the august session was a "cheat sheet" that would have some of the basic math that we used a lot to help some of the teachers who were not as accustomed to the algebra. it would include:

slope formula
equation of a line
equation of a circle
Some TI key sequences, such as how to enter Y₁ in an expression

Thursday, June 23, 2005

four tangent spheres

Given four points in 3D, under what conditions will there exist spheres centered at these points that are mutually tangent?

Monday, June 20, 2005

differential equations for teachers

I'm working on some material on differential equations that is part of a calculus workshop I'm doing next month. I know it's "advanced" but it seems to be the most natural way to use derivative qualitatively. We'll see!