From Boxes to Bees: Active Learning in Freshmen Calculus

The vehicles of education have seen significant broadening with the proliferation of new technologies such as social media, microblogs, online references, multimedia, and interactive teaching tools. This paper summarizes research on the effect of using active learning methods to facilitate student learning and describes our experiences implementing group activities for a calculus course for first year university students at Singapore University of Technology and Design, a new design-centric university established in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We describe the educational impact of different pedagogical techniques, such as real-time response tools, hands on activities, mathematical modeling, visualization activities and motivational competitions on students with differing learning preferences in a unique cohort classroom setting. Based on faculty reflection and survey data, we provide guidelines on how to adopt the right set of active and group learning techniques to handle the changing learning preferences in the current and future generation of students.