Interdisciplinary Lively Application Projects in Calculus Courses

We report on a two-year NSF-funded project to strengthen connections among science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. One component of this project was to produce some initial data on the effectiveness of Interdisciplinary Lively Applications Projects (ILAPs) in teaching science and engineering undergraduates. ILAPs are interdisciplinary group problem solving projects, co-written by mathematics faculty and science/technology/engineering faculty. These small group projects are designed to foster student interest by being lively, real world applications of mathematics in science and engineering. ILAPs are intended to assist students in learning to communicate across disciplines and in developing problem-solving skills. We summarize our development and use of ILAPs in the calculus courses and, in particular, describe our assessment data and results on the effectiveness of ILAPs in learning and related results.