Calculus Explorations

Paul Foerster's Calculus Explorations is a book of activities that encourage students to learn by exploring on their own. These activities were drawn from the Instructor's Resource Book for Foerster's innovative textbook, Calculus: Concepts and Applications.

Calculus Explorations supports a "many methods" approach to learning calculus, including the traditional algebraic as well as numerical, graphical, and verbal methods. Use it as a supplement to class lectures and to your regular calculus text.

These activities are designed to be worked with any graphing calculator that's capable of graphing functions, solving equations, and calculating the numerical derivative and definite integral.

Each exploration covers a particular concept or technique in calculus and requires minimal teacher guidance. In class, students can work in cooperative groups with a brief follow-up from you, or they can work the problems one at a time as directed-discovery exercises.

You can also assign an exploration as homework and follow up during the next class period. In or out of class, you'll find students will research a particular topic in their textbooks to get more information—a benefit to learning.

You can distribute copies of the book to each student, or reproduce individual explorations as needed. An index guides you to additional information about any topic for a given exploration, and solutions are included at the end of the book.