This PREP workshop was made possible by the NSF grant DUE: 0341481

Developing the Math and Escher course

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Our Math and Escher course was developed as part of an initiative at Saint Louis University called the SLU 2000 program. The aim of the program was to create freshmen seminars that exposed new students to full time faculty and gave them experience with the disciplines we teach. In the math department we decided that a collection of freshman courses aimed at those students who only needed one course to satisfy their math requirement for our College was worth pursuing. We designed several courses that can be taken instead of college algebra, satisfy the math requirement, and hopefully give the students examples of how mathematics is used in other disciplines.

We now offer a course Mathematics in the Real World based on the well known book by Berger and Starbird, Math and Escher, and a course Statistics in Sports and Politics. These courses reresent an interestng spectrum of possibilities. Using an established text like Berger and Starbird's text allows faculty to quickly develop a course. The explorations, text and exercises are all available and require no extra development of classroom materials.

Our Escher course is on the other end of the spectrum. We developed this course from scratch. We wrote our own explorations, our own exercises and eventually out own (online) text. It took several years to get the course in the form is in now.

For you (the participant) the possibilities are quite varied:

  • Create your own course from scratch.
  • Take this course an adapt it to your department's needs.
  • Use a subset of this material and incorporate it into an existing course. For instance use some of the non-Euclidean material in an existing geometry course.
  • Use a subset of this material and develop if further. For instance take a topic and develop teaching materials for a higher level course.


Some talking points:

  • What are the goals for the course? Our course aimed at freshmen. We do not include (many) proofs as learning objectives.
  • Collaborating with colleagues when creating a new course has been a successful approach for us. We usually have at least two faculty involved when developing a new course at the undergraduate level.
  • Time commitment. We agree to teach a completely new course for at least 3 years, so that we get some benefits from the experience we develop.
  • Not all students are used to explorations and groupwork. How do we set the tone those first couple of days? We have found that collecting work in the first days is important. We have made attendance part of the grade in the past.
  • What kinds of students have we attracted? For instance Fall 07 Bart had students who majored in: Education (3), English (2) French (1), Philosophy (1), Political Science (1), Psychology (2), Spanish (2) and Undecided (3). But this coming Fall (08) there are 4 Business Administration majors and 3 Education majors and one other so far, while another section is linked with an art class. Given very different student populations. Does this change the motivation for the material as given by the instructor? Should it?
  • What will the average class size be? What effect does that have on the course?
  • Will you have teaching assistants? At SLU we don't, but the classes are small (<20)
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