Project CALC: Brief Description

• What is it?
• Materials
• Goals
• Integrated lab experience
• Pedagogy
• Course format
• Lab versions

What is it?

Project CALC is an award-winning curriculum development project funded by the National Science Foundation. It has produced materials for a three-semester reformed calculus course that emphasizes

• real-world problems,
• hands-on activities,
• discovery learning,
• writing and revision of writing,
• teamwork,
• intelligent use of available tools, and
• high expectations of students.

Materials

Text and lab materials have been in development and testing since 1989 and have been used by thousands of students at more than 100 schools across the country (2- and 4-year colleges, universities, and high schools). The first edition of Calculus: Modeling and Application is now available. Please click here for more information on all available materials.

Goals

Students should

• be able to use mathematics to structure their understanding of and investigate questions in the world around them;
• be able to use calculus to formulate problems, to solve problems, and to communicate the solutions of problems to others;
• be able to use technology as an integral part of the problem-solving process;
• learn to work and learn cooperatively.

Integrated lab experience

Students working in teams in a computer or calculator lab

• explore real-world problems with real data,
• conjecture and test their conjectures,
• discuss their work with each other, and
• write up their results and conclusions.

This experience drives the rest of the course, and shapes the content and approach of the text and the classroom activities.

Pedagogy

We concentrate on LEARNING rather than on teaching. We provide a wide range of classroom and lab activities that will help students construct the mathematical knowledge they need. These activities include

• data-gathering experiments,
• model formulation and fitting,
• development of solution methods, and
• comparison of results with the original problem.

Course format

Our recommended format is three 50-minute periods per week in a classroom with demonstration computer or calculator projection, plus one 2-hour lab period in which each team has its own computer or individual graphing calculators. There are many variations of this format at schools that have used our materials. At Duke, maximum section size is 32 (eight 4-person teams). Each lab team submits a written report almost every week. Three reports per semester are formal submission, instructor review, resubmission for a grade. The others are fill-in-the-paragraph reports, often finished in the lab period, and submitted only once. Classroom teams work on a variety of projects that don't require technology beyond their calculators, but that often would be too difficult for individuals to do alone. Homework is assigned to individuals, typically collected and graded a week at a time.

Lab versions

Houghton Mifflin Co. has published laboratory manuals and supporting computer files for the following technologies:

• Maple
• Mathcad
• Mathematica
• Derive
• TI82/TI85
• HP48G/GX

A Mathwright version is available on the Web from the Mathwright Library. Web-based versions are in development by the Connected Curriculum Project. Additional hardware/software platforms are under consideration, and offers to convert to other platforms are welcome.

| Project CALC Home Page | Materials Page |
| Duke University | Department of Mathematics | Connected Curriculum Project |
| Lawrence Moore's Home Page | David Smith's Home Page |

Last modified: Aug. 12, 1997