This site provides a set of open, Creative Commons exercises for a variety of Calculus topics. The creators’ vision is to “help teachers create, edit and share open exercises and lessons with everyone around the world.”
The exercises start with differentiation and integration and go up to complex numbers.
Type of Material:
Drill and Practice, Teacher Resources.
Recommended Uses:
The material could be very useful for individual study or review. It could also be incorporated into a homework assignment or group activity.
Technical Requirements:
Microsoft Edge or Firefox, but on some computers it was unable to open the problem sets with Chrome.
Identify Major Learning Goals:
The purpose of this site is to provide open practice problems and solutions for various calculus problems. Teachers can register and create additional exercises.
Target Student Population:
College lower division or advanced placement high school.
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:
College Algebra, Calculus I
Content Quality
Rating:
Strengths:
Practice problems are available from a variety of Calculus I content areas – fourteen subcategories (for example Limits, Derivatives, Inverse Funtions), each including multiple topics including evaluating limits, using the chain rule, concavity, optimization, and integration by substitution. The number of practice problems available for each topic is listed next to the topic in the list. Teachers have the ability to create a free account to create new questions. This content could be useful to review calculus topics and could also be incorporated into group activities. The opening Grasple webpage also has links to a Help Center, Blog, Teacher Community and other open learning resources.
Concerns:
Each topic includes the possibility of a lesson – but most currently say “Lesson Unavailable.” Eleven topics are listed for Calculus II but at present all are unavailable.
Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool
Rating:
Strengths:
Users are allowed multiple attempts at each question. There is also an option to skip a problem. If the problem is skipped, the user is provided with a step-by-step solution to the problem. Correct answers produce a short summary explanation. Wrong answers produce hints for the option to retry.
Concerns:
If a user skips a problem, they are given a solution. They can re-attempt the problem, but the numerical values or functions used in the problem will not change.
Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty
Rating:
Strengths:
The site is easy to navigate, and the questions are interactive. When needed, users are provided with a math-type menu to make it easier to type in solutions. The opening page is visually appealing and easy to read.
Concerns:
When you click on a topic, the practice problems are each displayed in a rectangle on the screen so that users may choose a problem. Although the math type will display correctly when a user opens up the individual problem, it may not display correctly in the initial box. A few exercises do have multiple parts. As these problems are labeled “Question 1”, “Question 2”, etc, it may not be immediately obvious to some users that the parts are related. It might be helpful to relabel the questions or include a statement at the beginning of each problem to make this more obvious. The complex number section uses I rather than the more common i.
Creative Commons:
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