Fostering engagement through interdisciplinary projects, collaborative teams, and scaffolded autonomy: Making math for everyone (and especially for engineers)

Speakers

John Geddes (Olin College)
Sarah Spencer Adams (Olin College)

Details

In this talk, John and Sarah will discuss how fostering student engagement is a central theme of the mathematics curriculum at Olin College of Engineering. From day one, interdisciplinary projects and collaborative teaming experiences help cultivate student ownership in learning. Courses use increasing levels of autonomy in various ways to help keep motivation (and morale!) high. While a major goal of our curriculum is to develop students’ project management skills alongside their quantitative analysis skills, we believe that nurturing an environment of joy and camaraderie inside our classrooms could be the most important ingredient for deep learning.

Short video of Modeling and Simulation of the Physical World, a math/science course taken in the first semester at Olin. This course hits on many themes discussed in the talk in the context of QEA and Discrete Math. https://youtu.be/vx_p4Hrqwls?si=noOHNg9iBm_MQJsP
Short video about the most recent incarnations of the QEA course stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB8B9ykd1Ng&t=4s
QEA website/materials (earlier versions): https://qeacourse.github.io/#next
Paper written by early QEA faculty, "A contextualized, experiential learning approach to quantitative engineering analysis" https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8658526

Jon Stolk's work on understanding motivation, autonomy, and self-regulation, especially in project-based courses. Here is a sample of his work:
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1469787413481132

Fostering engagement through interdisciplinary projects, collaborative teams, and scaffolded autonomy: Making math for everyone (and especially for engineers)

Speakers

Details

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