Laboratory

The mathematics department believes that a student learns mathematics by doing mathematics. To encourage students to do mathematics, our entry-level courses, Calculus 1 and 2, have a laboratory component. All of our laboratory sections are limited to sixteen students.  Each week, students come to the mathematics lab, a room with tables rather than desks. The students sit around the tables and work in groups to work intensely on challenging problems. The laboratory could be based on material recently covered or it could be used to have students extend or generalize concepts. In any case, they are asked to use their mathematics, their graphing calculators and their writing skills to formulate their solutions. In the laboratory they are active learners. The lab instructor serves as a mentor who replies to their questions with questions to try and help the student to discover the answers to their own questions.

In the second year the laboratory experience continues with Calculus 3. The philosophy remains the same but in this course we make use of the sixteen Apple workstations using the symbolic manipulator Mathematica. This sophisticated and powerful program can graph in two and three dimensions, solve equations, do differentiation and integration and is itself a programming language.

The elective course, Differential Equations, also has a lab component that uses Mathematica and some specialized software.  Mathematics majors have twenty-four hour access to Roger Bacon Hall and the Mathematics Laboratory is always available for their use when there is no laboratory or class scheduled for the room.