Daily Archives: April 11, 2009
Multivariable Calculus Projects
Monday is the start of the 4th — and final — quarter at my school. I desperately want my Multivariable Calculus students to really love the end of the course. In the same spirit as the rest of the course (focusing on basic concepts and applying them to very difficult problems), I have decided to assign half as much homework and have students spend their time really investigating a hard problem, researching an interesting topic, or creating something based on what we’ve learned. Their choice.
I whipped up a draft of my expectations for their end of year project, which I’m embedding below (Go Scribd! I’ve been waiting for this feature to be WordPress.com compatible for eons!). I know this is not an ideal set of expectations. I need to clean up the redundant language, provide examples of good and bad prospectuses, as well as have on hand sample rubrics for students to use as guides when creating their own. (As an aside, if you know of any prospectuses/rubrics for me to show them, I’d very much appreciate you throwing the link down in the comments!) But my thought now is that I’ll see what happens this year, and then tweak it for future years:
I also spent a number of hours coming up with possible Multivariable Calculus projects, posted at my Multivariable Calculus resource site. I hope to add to it as ideas strike me. I’ll copy the projects that I have as of April 11, 2009, below the fold. But click the link above for a list that will hopefully be updated.
