This curated collection covers a selection of PRIMUS articles published over a roughly 12-year period that focus on modeling and applications. The collection includes sections on individual projects, courses with a significant modeling component, and modeling and applications in extracurricular settings and throughout the curriculum.

With this paper, we share an activity for the undergraduate mathematics classroom called "The Harp Project" that leverages the aesthetic nature of both the mathematical and the musical arts. This project was conceived as a STEAM/PBL project with the added feature that it was carried out in pieces by an entire class. Anecdotal evidence…

In this paper, we present an overview of a series of 1-credit applied problem solving courses. The goal of these courses was to help students develop their oral and written communication skills, ability to work as a team, and general problem solving skills through preparation and participation in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) and…

Transforming an observable phenomenon into a tractable model is a challenging process, from determining the appropriate modeling scale to making realistic simplifying assumptions. However, many modeling texts are anchored around problems that have already been synthesized into a digestible format, which inhibits an opportunity to engage students…

We consider the use of projects in math courses as a mechanism for promoting coding, communication, and interdisciplinary application of math skills. Final projects play an important role, but we also discuss several alternate types of projects. We describe a model that incorporates projects at all stages across the undergraduate mathematics…

Income inequality is a central social justice concern, and hence excellent motivation for real-world applications in mathematics classrooms at every level. We describe the "Mathematics for Social Justice" course at Saint Michael's College, giving a specific example of one of the typical social justice projects for the course, and showing…

In an increasingly data-driven world, facility with statistics is more important than ever for our students. At institutions without a statistician, it often falls to the mathematics faculty to teach statistics courses. This paper presents a model that a mathematician asked to teach statistics can follow. This model entails connecting with faculty…

Mathematics has a unique and powerful role to play in the teaching of social justice issues. There is substantial quantitative evidence for social injustice, but many citizens lack the quantitative skills to understand that evidence. A course in quantitative literacy is a unique opportunity to provide this quantitative understanding to a wide…

We provide context and motivation for an instructor to use real-life examples in the calculus classroom. To this end we describe two specific project ideas, one related to the devastating impact of methylmercury fungicide in a grain seed supply and the other to a catastrophic methane leak. By using calculus in contexts that have social justice…

The Mathematics Practicum has been offered at St. Olaf College for over 30 years. The Practicum is a 4-week, January Interim course where three teams of five students work on consulting problems solicited from area businesses, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. These problems have significant mathematical, statistical, and…

James Madison University faculty team-teach an interdisciplinary mathematical modeling course for mathematics and biology students. We have used two different project-based approaches to emphasize the mathematical concepts taught in class, while also exposing students to new areas of mathematics not formally covered in class. The first method…

Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle, or Workshop on potential literature), an over 50-year old movement that began in France, seeks to apply mathematical constraints to literature and the arts. In this article, I will give a brief survey of this movement and how I have built a learning module based on it for my mathematics for the liberal…

Math in the City is an interdisciplinary mathematics course offered at University of Nebraska-Lincoln in which students engage in a real-world experience to understand current major societal issues of local and national interest. The course is run in collaboration with local businesses, research centers, and government organizations, that provide…

Most educators know that the best way to truly understand new material is to teach it. The use of students as peer educators provides numerous benefits to the student teacher and his or her classmates. Student-led instruction or peer-to-peer teaching is not a new concept or teaching technique. Peer teaching traces its roots back to the ancient…

For some students, using the method of cross sections to find the volume of a solid is difficult to understand because of the abstraction involved. This paper demonstrates a fun way for students to visualize the method of cross sections. Although a fun activity, the paper implicitly conveys the importance of connecting theory and experiment.…