Pre-Workshop Assignment

Our welcome letter has already given you a number of tasks to do -- setting up your computer to read our textbook, getting ready to use Adobe Connect conferencing software for the workshop itself, filling out a survey form for our evaluator, and (if you wish) dropping in to the conference room on Sunday to make sure everything is ready. We also have a specific assignment for you to do some work with the text, especially to see some of the ways in which it differs from a conventional calculus book. We won't ask you to "turn in" anything, and there won't be any grading, but we will ask you to make some notes on points that will come up during the workshop. If you have set up Firefox with MathML fonts and "new window" as your preference for new pages, we are ready to begin.

  1. Start at the textbook home page. You will observe the Table of Contents on the left and auxiliary links on the right. You may have already visited some of the auxiliary pages, and you can (re-)visit them at any time. With the "new window" option, this window should always be open, although other windows may be in front of it.
  2. Click on Chapter 2. Models of Growth: Rates of Change. (From here on, the links will be in the book only.) This brings up a more detailed Table of Contents for Chapter 2, in which the sections are listed (and linked) with a line for every page. (The "C" icon next to a page means this is a page that uses a computer algebra system, although in many cases we have a built-in alternative.)
  3. The first section in the book that introduces a calculus concept is 2.2 -- click on the link for that section. (The link for page 2.2.1 goes to the same place.) You now have three windows open, and all but the home page are visible on the screen. All text pages will appear in the window in which you see 2.2.1. Exercise pages will have yet another window, so that a text page can be be open at the same time. There will be small pop-up windows for special purposes, as you will see -- each has a Close the Window button, so you can get rid of them when you are through with them.
  4. Here's the heart of the assignment. We want you to read through this section -- 5 text pages, plus Summary, Exercises, and Problems -- exploring the Activities and Checkpoints along the way. The book is not going to tell you how to run your classroom, but imagine that the Activities are the basis for small-group or whole-class discussion, not necessarily an individual challenge to every student. The Checkpoints are more for individual use -- for each student to check his or her comprehension of what was just discussed. You don't have to assess any of these things -- most of the Activities have our observations either in a pop-up Comment box or following immediately in the text, and every Checkpoint has a drop-down answer box.

    Where activities need computational help, we have provided links to files for Maple, Mathcad, and Mathematica, as well as (in some cases) a link to a Flash applet that will do the job without outside help. For this assignment, even if you have a CAS installed, we recommend you use the Flash applet when available. The one that appears several times in this section is essentially a graphing calculator with some special features. The first time it appears with detailed instructions -- after that, the instructions are suppressed.
  5. Make notes about anything that seems strange or that raises a question for you. Most of those questions will be answered in the course of the workshop, but if not, be sure to call that to our attention during the week.
  6. When you click Forward from the Summary page (or the next page link in the TOC), you will open the Exercises page, and you will see on it a WeBWorK logo -- which is a live link to a WeBWorK server at MAA. Ignore that for now -- we'll take that up next week. We label as Exercises the activities that are susceptible to being machine graded, and we separate as Problems the ones that definitely require human response. So the Forward button from Exercises takes you to the Problems page. [Caveat: This distinction exists only for Chapters 1-5 at the moment. We will be finishing that task over the summer.] Read through the Exercises and Problems to get a sense of our expectations of students. Again, make notes on anything you want to ask about.

For extra credit (say, 200% of the credit we're granting otherwise): There is a new, free, online tool called Wolfram|Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/) that will be available to your students any time they are online. You can type almost any kind of calculation request into its input box, and it will tell you everything Mathematica can calculate about it. Think about how this might alter your course, your curriculum, your text materials, your expectations of your students. Maria will bring this up in her presentation.