Projects
The IUSE Open Workshop organizers are pleased to support teams involved with each of the following projects supporting math and computer science undergraduate education.
Algebra, Trigonometry & Calculus in View: Expanded Modeling & Graphing Techniques for Today's Student
Project team: Alison Bonner, Larry Musolino, Elizabeth Nelson
DoenetML Interactive Activities
Project team: Duane Nykamp, Jason Altekruse, Virginia Mae
The Distributed Open Education Network (Doenet) is an open data-driven educational technology platform designed to measure and share student interactions with web pages. The Doenet platform includes tools for authoring interactive educational content and conducting educational research using the content. Our ultimate goal is to provide research-based tools to help instructors and learners discover the most effective content.
GeT: A Pencil
Project team: Patricio Herbst, Amanda Brown, Srikanth Lavu, Nathaniel Miller
The GeT Support II project aims to enhance undergraduate geometry courses for future secondary teachers by fostering collaboration among educators. It focuses on developing open digital resources for Geometry instruction, with the goal of building a supportive community that establishes consensus on course content and experiences, ultimately improving teaching quality.
Key project goals include:
Enhancing teachers' mathematical proficiency through agreed-upon content and experiences.
Cultivating an inclusive community of educators for resource development.
Designing and testing open educational materials for Geometry instruction.
The project's approach goes beyond resource creation to understand the rationale behind choices and how these resources are utilized and adapted. It aims to explore how these resources shape Geometry courses and benefit both the community and individual teachers. The project has the potential for broader impact by developing and providing free resources for all Geometry instructors in the U.S., potentially benefiting disadvantaged students. Additionally, secondary resources will be offered to aid effective resource utilization, thus enhancing teaching quality. The project also aims to expand its teacher community through this initiative, fostering increased collaboration and resource sharing among educators.
Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software
Project team: Grant Braught, Lori Postner, Karl Wurst
URL: https://teachingopensource.org/HFOSS_Education_Overview
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is software developed by communities and made available to others under licenses that allow them to use, modify and redistribute the software with their changes. HFOSS is a subset of FOSS with an explicit humanitarian focus (disaster relief, education, medical care, food security, etc.). An HFOSS Kit aims to gain the advantages of engaging a broad audience of computing students in the rich authentic context and sense of purpose of an HFOSS project, while mitigating some of the challenges that faculty face in attempting to do so. An HFOSS Kit does this by “freezing” a snapshot of an existing HFOSS project’s artifacts (code, issues, etc.) and packaging them with learning activities, an instructor guide, containerized development environments (KitClients), and a virtual assistant (the Kit-tty). “Freezing” the HFOSS project enables a Kit to contain assignments that engage students with specific artifacts in their authentic context, while amortizing the cost of developing and refining these assignments across semesters, courses and institutions, even as the live HFOSS project continues to evolve.
[Not] Just Math: Mathematics Lessons with a Cause
Project team: Cazembe Kennedy, Tiffeni Fontno, Erin Geier, Anita Wager
Not Just Math is an open access education project to preserve and share lesson plans that incorporate children’s literature, mathematics, and social justice themes into synergistic educational experiences for elementary school students. Not Just Math enables educators to search for and download lesson plans based on any keyword, math topic, social concept, author, grade level, math standard, or book title. Anyone can upload a lesson plan for review for inclusion in the publicly available collection. The project intends to expand into middle and high-school level curricula as well as provide opportunities for STEM education students to learn about the effective nexus of literature, math, and social justice. In places like Tennessee where there is increasingly restricted access to books in public school libraries, the creation of networks of teachers and online spaces to share resources about literature with inclusive themes is especially important. Not Just Math’s goal is to become a community hub for the sharing of curricula that will foster inclusivity and future dreaming.
Taking CalcPlot3D to the Next Dimension: Creating 3D-Printed Learning Materials
Project team: Paul Seeburger, Stepan Paul, Deborah Moore-Russo, Shelby Stanhope
URLs:
CalcPlot3D is a free online 3D graphing app designed to enhance the teaching and learning of multivariable calculus. In addition to facilitating the visual exploration of multivariable calculus concepts, this tool also can be used to create STL files of surfaces and curves to 3D print. The main purpose of the current collaborative research project is to help students develop a deeper understanding of multivariable calculus concepts through the development of hands-on, physical 3D explorations using guided learning activities and innovative, pedagogically-designed 3D-printed surfaces and solids. Some of these learning activities start by exploring the concepts on 3D-printed surfaces and eventually connect students to the corresponding objects and concepts in CalcPlot3D to extend their understanding through hands-on engagement.
AIMath.org 2025 Workshop on Open Educational Resources
Project team: Violeta Vasilevska, Veronika Furst, Lon Mitchell, Shahla Nasserasr
This team will be hosting an OER workshop sponsored by the American Institute of Mathematics in Spring/Summer 2025. The intended audience of this workshop is faculty (like us) who are interested in adopting, curating, and customizing existing open educational resources. The focus of the workshop will be learning how to use the PROSE Open-Source Ecosystem: the open-source language PreTeXt, the Learning Engineering Analytics Portal Runestone, the open-source online homework system WeBWorK, and the open data-driven educational technology platform Doenet. Learning this complex ecosystem will provide faculty with state-of-the-art technology to create and curate OERs in STEM education, in such a way that meets ADA accessibility requirements. Our overarching goals for the AIM workshop are to empower faculty previously intimidated by OER-related technological hurdles; aid faculty in communicating OER objectives; and broaden participation in the OER movement, especially focusing on historically underserved students.