dB-SERC Course Transformation Award
Edison Hauptman
Pitt’s Calculus sequence is dense and highly structured, designed with the goal to establish and measure students' basic competencies in certain core concepts. They’ll need to know these concepts for future work in their majors, and the name of our textbook ("Essential Calculus") makes the mission clear. As a TA, I am aware that every minute I spend on something interesting is a minute not spent on reviewing for the all-important test. And because everyone takes a common final, our professors work with similar restrictions in their lectures. I don't mean to minimize the good work that our professors and TAs do, but I observe that the incentives in our course structure make our Calculus courses soulless—and I simply do not believe that's how any of us became interested in math ourselves!
For the past two summers, I have transformed my 12-week Calculus 2 course to better recognize the diversity of students who learn from our department. I still presented the core curriculum, but I designed various assignments so my students could choose a path through the material that best suited their skills and interests.
To give you an idea of some of the paths available: students who quickly picked up on the material from my lectures took on a steeper challenge by solving difficult homework problems. Students who learned the material well when studying with someone else got to present review problems to the class in recitations. And students who wanted to apply Calculus to their major completed relevant projects, sometimes of their own design!
One of my students with experience in digital media wondered about the Bézier curve tool he'd seen in Photoshop, and he built a tutorial in Unity explaining how they are parameterized. Another student beginning a Chemistry major wanted to dive into the Calculus underpinning the rate laws for chemical reactions, so he wrote a paper on it and included an example of a less common rate law he found in the literature.
Mentoring my students through projects like these, two things are clear: First, math is much more interesting when you have the freedom to explore it in your own way. Second, when you engage with math in pursuit of something you care about, you're going to understand the math better. The structure of my course was a success because I empowered my students to carve their own path according to their interests, and because learning math through projects gives it more staying power than learning it for an exam.
In the Summer 2023 term, I did all the extra work for this course myself, but for last summer's course, I was awarded a grant from the Discipline-Based Science Education Research Center (dB-SERC) to run the course again, this time with the help of a TA (Michael Bulus) and grader (Indira Zeinikesheva). The folks who have presented at dB-SERC's weekly lunch seminar have taught me much about effective STEM education, and their grant allowed me to improve on my first iteration of the course by adding new assignments, refining my current assignments, and improving my rubrics. As a condition of dB-SERC’s grant, I will give three lunch talks on my course transformation, and my second talk is scheduled for Monday, February 10th at 12pm in Allen Hall 321. If you’d like to hear more about how the second iteration went, I’d love to see you there!
This semester, I have brought my experience from dB-SERC and two course transformations into a course offered by Pitt's School of Education ("Design of Educational Systems"), where I am developing a prototype for bringing projects into all our Calculus courses. So far, my design team has spoken to students, instructors, and administrators in math and related fields, and my team and I are learning how to bring some of what made my course transformation great into all the Calculus courses at Pitt. By taking this course, I am learning how to put my teaching philosophy into practice, and as I write this, 11 weeks into the term, this experience has already been invaluable to my future career as an educator.”
Graduation Awards
Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship Award
- Aashi Dalal
- Silvino Reyes Farina
- Ka Nap Tse
2024 Silverman-Culver Recipient (graduate)
- Eugene Eyeson
Mathematics Teaching Assistant Excellence Award
- Jordan Bennett
- Daniel Maienshein
- Asia Parker
Thomas C. Hales Distinguished Research Award
- Jing Tian