Preface Notes for Instructors
Hi! I’m glad you’re looking at this text, and I’m excited to share it with you. I want to outline a couple of thoughts I’ve had while putting this together and envisioning how an instructor could use this.
First, this book is created to be used in a relatively active classroom. In each section, for each topic, we try to motivate definitions, theorems, and other big results through the use of classroom activities. These are designed to be used in class as group-based explorations, but could be used also as guided exercises for students to complete in other contexts as well. In this sense, each section’s mixture of Activities, Definitions, Theorems, and Examples serve as fairly usable lesson plans for each topic.
Chapters can be divided into two groups: one for the topics typically included in a first semester differential calculus course (Chapters 1-5) and the other for the topics typically included in a second semester integral calculus course (Chapters 6-9).
There are several different resources and formats that come along with this book. All of these are available at
discovercalculus.com.-
The HTML option is likely the main source used, suitable for instructors to use during class sessions and students to reference outside of class. This option has the best navigation and displays interactive elements. It displays nicely on a projector for use during class sessions.
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There is a PDF option for printing, as well as PDF options for just chapters 1-5 (titled Discover Calculus 1) and chapters 6-9 (Discover Calculus 2).
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PDF printouts of just the class activities from each section are available as well. These are available in a compilation of all of the chapters, as well as subset versions for Discover Calculus 1 and Discover Calculus 2. These pdf printouts are ideal for printing to use as class handouts or a small bound workbook for each student.
Finally, there are some other resources available at
discovercalculus.com, specifically at discovercalculus.com/instructorresources.html. Primarily, you can find Python notebooks that demonstrate a selection of the concepts from this book. These demonstrations are useful as class examples or as a component of the out-of-class work that a student could do. They are all self-contained, requiring no local installation of python or other software, and can be modified to fit your class as you see fit.
Thanks, again, for thinking about using Discover Calculus as a teaching and learning resource for you and your students!
