Dear colleague,

We have received NSF Phase 2 collaborative expansion grant funding for 
developing, testing, and disseminating the teaching of discrete 
mathematics and computer science via student projects based on primary 
historical sources during the years 2008-2011.  This builds on the 
development of initial projects and testing under our Phase 1 pilot grant. 
Our expansion grant already has about 20 faculty at other institutions 
planning to test the new projects we will create, with some authoring new 
ones as well.

We are writing now to invite any additional instructors who might wish to 
test our future projects during years 2008-2011 in courses in discrete 
mathematics, combinatorics, logic, or computer science, or perhaps even to 
design your own projects.  We can provide some NSF support for travel 
and/or consulting for site testers.  And some of us will be at the Joint 
Mathematics Meetings in January 2008 in San Diego, and would be happy to 
meet interested people there.

The pedagogy of our projects is that topics are introduced and studied via 
primary historical sources, allowing students to participate in the sense 
of discovery, and to appreciate and gain motivation from the context in 
which concepts were developed.  For example, we have authored classroom 
modules in which students learn mathematical induction from Pascal's 
"Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle," written in the 1660's. Another 
module develops the short recursion relation for the Catalan numbers from 
a seminal paper of G. Lam\'e in 1838 (based on a start by Euler!!)

We authored 18 project modules under the pilot grant; all these modules 
and more information can be found at www.math.nmsu.edu/hist_projects/. 
These modules will appear in a chapter of a forthcoming MAA resource book 
for teaching discrete mathematics.  We found that 65% of the students who 
completed a course with these historical projects performed equally well 
or better than the mean GPA in subsequent mathematics and computer science 
courses.

You can see a description of the new projects we are planning under the 
expansion grant at http://www.math.nmsu.edu/~davidp/projII.pdf, or at the 
rough beginnings of our new web pages for the expansion grant at 
http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/historical-projects/.

If you or a colleague would be interested in teaching with a new project 
during 2008-2011, we would like to hear from you.

Thanks,

David Pengelley

for our team of 7 PIs in mathematics and computer science at New Mexico 
State University and Colorado State University - Pueblo

_____________________________________________________________________________
David Pengelley ([log in to unmask])
Mathematics, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003 USA
Tel: 575-646-3901=dept., 575-646-2723=my office; Fax: 575-646-1064 
http://math.nmsu.edu/~davidp