Teaching
All of our calculus courses (I-III and business) as well as our elementary
functions course are taught using the Harvard Calculus Consortium (you
can find resources on the Consortium here).
I, along with most of the department, use TI
graphing calculators in these courses.
More personally, I have either used or am using the following in my
teaching:
-
Mathematica --- as steep as the learning
curve is, you cannot deny how useful Mathematica can be in showing students
powerful mathematics. While I have written notebooks to accompany
the calculus sequence while at Berkeley, these days my focus is primarily
using Mathematica for class presentations and programming exercises.
-
MATLAB --- we have a lab outfitted with
MATLAB and use it for a variety of courses. I've developed some software
in MATLAB which I've found very helpful in teaching multivariable calculus
(note: to use this software, both pieces must be downloaded and run in
MATLAB. Also, the software takes input in a vectorized form for MATLAB,
so there's no need to use periods after arithmetic operations to indicate
coordinate-wise arithmetic.):
-
graph3d.m graph3d.mat
- graphs up to two functions of two variables and allows you to rotate
the results in real time.
-
congrad.m congrad.mat
- given a function of two variables, gives a contour plot and plots the
gradient field
-
pcurve2d.m pcurve2d.mat
- plots a parametric curve in two dimensions as well as velocity and acceleration
vectors. Will also plot a two dimensional vector field.
-
pcurve3d.m pcurve3d.mat
- the same as pcurve2d, except in three dimensions. The resulting
plots can be rotated in real time.
-
psurface.m psurface.mat - will plot parametric surfaces in three dimensions and allow you to rotate them in real time.
-
Dr. Annalisa Crannell's materials
on writing in mathematics. This is a very useful site, both for ideas
on writing projects and how to grade a project once you've gotten it.
- The Galileo site at Harvard (galileo.harvard.edu) is a good resource for peer instruction and ConcepTests, including many of the tests I've written for multivariable calculus.