PI: G.V. Loganathan, Associate Professor - Civil and Environmental Engineering

Project Goals or Needs Addressed: "What data…the math department had, the so called math readiness core for students to get into the regular engineering calculus sequence ...almost 50% of the students couldn’t make it by that threshold so they were exploring ways to teach particularly the freshman calculus for engineering students in a better way and that is where they instituted this program called the Emerging Scholars Program (ESP)."
Project Grants and Expenditures: $20,000 (year 6), $25,000 (year 7), $9000 (year 8), Graduate Assistants, equipment



Conference Paper: The deflected beam in differential calculus: Bringing engineering into the mathematics classroom
(PDF file)
 


Instead of teaching a pre-calculus course which students were "unhappy" with since it repeated high school work, this project instituted an ESP program which supplemented the existing calculus course. The ESP-calculus course presented the same content as non-ESP calculus courses, but added a one extra credit hour class in which students worked "a lot of group problems to reinforce what they had learned in the regular lecture."

Further, the project staff "built [their] own equipment" and instrumentation that would allow students to conduct hands-on lab experiments, and created a CD-Rom that would simulate the experiments for students who could not make it to the lab. Calculus material was introduced via lecture, then students could experience lab-based and/or CD-Rom experiments to help understand the presented concepts. "…the students if they have the opportunity they will come to the engineering labs, do the experiments, whether they have that opportunity or not they can obviously use the CD-Rom to see how the experiment would work."