Activities FAQ

Ithaca College Calculus Project

Questions About Using Activities

Question: How can using activities improve my course?

Answer: Activities involve the students in their own
learning. Both attendance and participation improve. Students
who have used activities regularly in class tend to make better
comments and ask more significant questions about course material
than did those in our more traditional classes.

The activities in Calculus: An Active Approach with
Projects have several purposes. They introduce new calculus
topics, often in a guided discovery format. This reduces the
amount of formal presentation that the instructor must do. They
help the students become better modelers and problem solvers.
This helps the students complete projects successfully and also
helps them solve shorter problems. Students who have experienced
activities and projects do not regard "word problems " with
dismay.

Question: How do you do an activity in class?

Answer: Each activity is different. Some involve several
pieces of student work, each followed by the instructor drawing
out solutions and helping with summaries. Others are done more
independently by the students. Some are intended to be done
outside class as follow-ups to classroom work.

Some of the activities (for example, "Gotcha ") are short
open-ended problems. Others (for example, "Fundamental Theorem
of Calculus ") provide a road map to some new calculus concepts.

While the students are working, you should watch and listen to
some of their discussions. You can give some guidance, but don't
be too quick to show them an answer. Sometimes students will
help students in another group, and we don't discourage this.

We have found that it is important that the students see the
solutions and some sort of summary at the end of each activity.
This immediate feedback solidifies their understanding.

Question: Do activities affect the course grade?

Answer: We usually avoid grading activities, preferring
that the students feel free to use them to explore calculus ideas
without thinking about how the explorations will affect their
course grades. However, exams and quizzes do include questions
related to the ideas they get from doing the activities.

Question: How long does each activity take?

Answer: A few activities require an entire fifty-minute
class period, but many of them are much shorter. Some require as
little as five minutes. A discussion of each activity appears in
this Instructor's Guide. These discussions include
estimates of how much time each activity requires.

Back to exerpts from the Instructor's Guide

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This page maintained by: Diane Driscoll Schwartz, Ithaca College
schwartz@ithaca.edu

Last Modified: January 8, 2000