I have long incorporated physics simulations in my physics teaching, and truly appreciate those who have made their simulations available to the public. I often would think of an idea for a simulation I would love to be able to use, but with no real programming background I did not know how I could make my own. That was the case until I discovered…

Escape rooms are an increasingly popular puzzle game, and educators have started implementing them in classrooms. This paper will describe the motivations and implementation of escape-room-like puzzles in an undergraduate cryptography course, including how the open-source mathematics software system SageMath is used. In addition, there is a…

Children love sculpting clay or building sand castles, creating objects in three dimensions before they have the motor skills to draw in two dimensions. Similar arguments applied to the study of curves and graphs in high school mathematics would suggest that students' work and calculation with shapes should move sequentially from concrete to more…

Sage is an open-source software package that can be used in many different areas of mathematics, ranging from algebra to calculus and beyond. One of the most exciting pedagogical features of Sage (http://www.sagemath.org) is its ability to create interacts--interactive examples that can be used in a classroom demonstration or by students in a…

It's like a dream come true for educators: free resources available wherever a web browser can operate and with nary an iota of advertising. What's not to like? What is it about this organization, whose mission is "to provide a free, world-class education for anyone anywhere," that has provoked such vitriol? Part of it is that when its videos have…

This paper explores the use of blogs, a simple application of Web 2.0 technologies, in middle school geometry instruction. Specifically, it provides an overview of the interactive features of Web 2.0 technologies and the feasibility of using Web 2.0 technologies in geometry teaching and learning, as well as a proposed model for creating a…

This article describes the benefits and drawbacks of using Wolfram|Alpha as the platform for teaching calculus concepts in the lab setting. It is a result of our experiences designing and creating an entirely new set of labs using Wolfram|Alpha. We present the reasoning behind our transition from using a standard computer algebra system (CAS) to…

Less than half of the students in the United States graduate from high school and are ready to take college-level math courses. Many years and varieties of remedial math programs have failed to dramatically improve outcomes, especially at scale. The question we face is whether technology in general, and open educational resources in particular,…