Month: September 2018

Workshop 1: 9/20/2018

Workshop 1 was more of a pilot workshop. This workshop didn’t have much structure, and it was planned to be more free flowing to determine what the attendees want to get out of the workshop. There were 5 people total who attended. While this was less than we were hoping for, to be honest, it was more than we anticipated.

This pilot workshop, in my opinion, was a success. People were asking questions, learning, and seeking our help. At the end, we asked students if they felt that they had been effective and accomplished what they wanted, and most students answered yes. In the future, we would like to incorporate some way to get students to work together on homework, since most of the time students worked independently.

Introduction

The capstone project is a way for STEM EE scholars to engage in a project that exhibits one of the Honors and Scholars G.O.A.L.S. For my capstone project, I have decided to work on a calculus workshop that aims to provide current calculus I and II students with another resource to enrich their learning. I am doing this project with a close friend fellow STEM EE scholar Alex Demos. As a prior student of calculus, I know that some of the concepts that students are seeing for the first or perhaps a second time are quite confusing and are very different from other forms of math encountered in prior math courses. Calculus require more critical thinking than just rote computation, and this causes some of the problems to become very frustrating very quickly. These workshops will be another resource for students who may be stuck during homework, or for those who need another way of looking at a concept, so  that the learning process is not hindered by feelings of futility while trying to solve a problem.

The other purpose to these workshops is to try and get an understanding who goes to workshops like these. Do only students who struggle in calculus attend? Is it only students in calculus I, or do students from all calculus classes attend? Do the students attend office hours, and if so do they find them useful? These are the types of questions this project aims to answer, and with this knowledge it may better help shape resources offered to students.