Extra credit assignment

You’ll have a chance to bump up your overall grade, if you wish, by completing one of the assignments below. There are three choices (but the first choice has sub-choices). For each assignment, you’ll be posting here on the OpenLab. You’ll be posting a final copy only. Before you post, however, you must submit a draft to a classmate for peer review. Peer reviewers may earn extra credit too, even if they don’t write posts themselves.

Deadline for submitting to peer reviewer: Monday, May 19

Deadline to post final draft: Wednesday, May 21 (the day of the final exam)

Topic choices:

1. Lesson plan. Learn a topic from the list below, and come up with a lesson plan to explain it to your classmates. Your post should be about the length of around 2-3 handwritten pages. (If it’s easier, you may write the lesson by hand and upload photos/scans of them.) The structure is up to you, but one suggested outline is:

(a) Motivating question or example

(b) Statement of theorem

(c) Proof of theorem

(d) Example applying the theorem

Topics:

*Mean value theorem

*Intermediate value theorem

*Newton’s method

*Ham sandwich theorem

*Integration by substitution

*Other topics may be possible; just ask first. No two people should write about the same topic.

2. Personal mathematical/educational history and self-reflection. Everyone in the class has taken a different route that has eventually has brought them to the Honors Calculus I class at City Tech. Describe, in as much detail as you like, what your own route has been. What is your earliest mathematical memory? What has your relationship with math been throughout your life, both inside and outside the classroom? Has it changed over time? What aspects of your mathematical education had the biggest impact on you? What were your biggest challenges? What were your greatest successes?

3. Calculus with Maple. This choice might be the most interesting if you’re enrolled in or interested in a computer science program and not already taking the Calculus Lab course. Maple is a computer algebra system that you can download for free from the CUNY eMall. For this assignment, select a calculus problem from this semester and have Maple solve it for you. (I can’t be a lot of help for this, but there are many valuable online resources and I think this should be easy if you have any programming experience.)