We present a free student-facing tool for creating 3D plots and smartphone-based virtual reality (VR) visualizations for STEM courses. Visualizations are created through an in-browser interface using simple plotting commands. Then QR codes are generated, which can be interpreted with a free smartphone app, requiring only an inexpensive Google…

In differential equations textbooks, the motion of a simple pendulum for small-amplitude oscillations is analyzed. This is due to the impossibility of expressing, in terms of simple elementary functions, the solutions of the nonlinear differential equation (NLDE) that models the pendulum, which is why the authors usually choose the linearized…

We present the Active Learning tools introduced in basic mathematics courses in the Preparatory Curriculum for Engineering schools at Université Claude Bernard. Additions were introduced in the academic year 2018/2019 in Foundations of Mathematics 2, in the first year of bachelor study program. Its content are Linear Algebra (matrices, vector…

Helping students reach a clear understanding of the cause-and-effect relationship between changes in parameter and the graph of an equation is the focus of the activity outlined in this article. The behavior of phase shifts has been regarded as counterintuitive for many people, and often, because of this, conflict between student intuition and…

This article shows how the exciting new field of Machine Learning can be effectively introduced in a standard calculus sequence, once the students have been introduced to functions of several variables. This is an opportunity to engage students in a discussion of an application of calculus to an emerging field that the students encounter in their…

This article describes the revision of a Business Calculus course at a medium-sized, northwestern university. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the need for a redesign of the Business Calculus course, conversations among math and business faculty about the course changes, the development of the new course, and the addition of a…

Most any students can explain the meaning of "a[superscript b]", for "a" [element-of] [set of real numbers] and for "b" [element-of] [set of integers]. And some students may be able to explain the meaning of "(a + bi)[superscript c]," for "a, b" [element-of] [set of real numbers] and for…

Despite shifting to emergency remote teaching, a teacher's role and responsibility was to keep teaching their course to the same high academic standards as before COVID-19 upended our community. Meeting this challenge, without being able to use many well-established teaching practices, was also an unwanted opportunity to learn and experiment with…

The contexts of the problems educators choose can affect students' mathematical identities by affecting their abilities to relate to the mathematics (Middleton, Jansen, and Goldin 2017). Moreover, these choices send powerful messages to students about the relevancy of mathematics to their own lives (Felton 2010). Eliciting and drawing on student…

In this classroom note, we describe the use of a wiki to aggregate student solutions to calculation-based mathematics problems. We outline the setup of the wiki used to support this project, the administrative issues involved in running a wiki, and student reaction to the wiki project. We will describe how students participated, and were assessed,…

This article describes the use of a spreadsheet to reinforce basic calculus that is expected of all university-level chemistry majors. The example provided shows a calculation using Excel to estimate, using a Riemann summation, the radiant exitance of a hot object using Planck's Law of Blackbody Radiation. The approach reinforces the elementary…

Our traditional model of calculus instruction at a large public research university emphasized factual knowledge and procedural fluency with few realistic applications, leaving a chasm between classroom mathematics and disciplinary practice. Amid an ongoing effort by our department to improve undergraduate learning outcomes, we replaced…

Ordinary Differential Equations I, is one of the core courses for science and engineering majors. Practical problem solving in science and engineering programs require proficiency in mathematics. Improving student performance and retention in mathematics classes requires inventive approaches. At the University of Central Florida (UCF) the…

We discuss a decade of initiatives to improve the teaching and learning of calculus at The Ohio State University. Calculus at OSU is taught in lecture/recitation format with large lectures and is tightly coordinated, so all innovations had to occur within that framework. We show how many smaller projects built upon one another to create a larger…

Previous work covers building a tower from a stack of homogeneous rectangular plates, each with a maximum shift in displacement. We suggest using plates shaped as curvilinear triangles bounded by segments of power-law functions. The masses of the plates and the position of their center of mass are calculated and measured experimentally after…