By: Katie Haymaker, Co-Editor of DUE Point, Villanova University

DUE Point features a different NSF-funded project each month, but our interviews are only able to capture a snapshot of the progress the investigators are making at the time. At the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM), we work to touch base with new projects and see how ongoing initiatives are shaping up. The JMM was in Denver, Colorado in January 2020, and my co-editors and I had the opportunity to catch up with many of our past featured projects at the MAA Poster Session on Projects Supported by the NSF Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE). In this post, I’ll share snippets and updates about those efforts, as well as links to our past posts. 

If you weren’t able to make it to the meetings or the poster session, or even if you were there but couldn’t get all the way around the room (there were nearly 80 posters!), I hope you enjoy browsing through the list below for some inspiring ideas about undergraduate mathematics education. 

• We first caught up with Aaron Wangberg of Winona State University to talk about the project Raising Calculus to the Surface. The project was featured in the DUE Point post Holding Calculus in Your Hands, from May 2019. Aaron’s update is: The Raising Calculus to the Surface Project has just finished, but we received some NSF funding to run a workshop this summer together with the Vector Calculus Bridge Project. The workshop will be at Concordia University in Irvine, California. It will run June 22-June 25, 2020, and there are spots for about 24 workshop participants. We are hoping that this will lead to a larger ongoing collaboration. (See https://raisingcalculus.winona.edu/content/get-surfaces-and-attend-summer-workshop for workshop details!) Aaron is also the co-PI on the Raising Physics to the Surface project, which you can see in the left-hand poster in the photo.

• Next we chatted with Kate Kozak (Coconino CC), Ambika Silva (College of the Canyons), and Jenna Carpenter (Campbell University), about StatPREP, which was featured on the DUE Point blog in March of 2019. Kate gave the following update: Last year we’ve been spending time and energy to write ‘Little Activities’ that go with the ‘Little Apps’ so that you have group activities to take directly into your classes and use them right away. For information on these exciting resources and more ideas from the StatPREP project about teaching data-centric statistics, visit the resources page here: http://statprep.org/statprep-resources/

• Jess Ellis Hagman (Colorado State University), updated us on The MPWR Seminar: Mentoring and Partnerships for Women in RUME (Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education). The MPWR project was featured among DUE Point’s first set of posts, back in November of 2018. Jess provided an update on this empowering project: We are on our last year of NSF funding---this has been an NSF-funded project for a long time---and we’re transitioning away from that. It will be interesting to see how the seminar continues without such funding. We are looking at having it become a part of RUME, a continued structure within that seminar, and we’re also looking at other possibilities. It is a challenge that opens up more opportunities.

• Our next update came from Phil Hotchkiss (Westfield State University), of the Discovering the Art of Mathematics Project (DUE Point post here). DAoM has 11 inquiry-based learning guides for math for liberal arts students. Each guide represents a whole course and is freely available from our website, artofmathematics.org. We would certainly be happy to hear from anyone who is interested in using or who is using our materials!

• Ann Sitomer (Oregon State University) is the co-PI on Project SLOPE, and she shared the following update since our December DUE Point post. SLOPE stands for Scholarly Leaders Originating as Practitioning Educators at two-year colleges. What’s really new is (1) we’re trying to scale this project up, by building it into the routines and structures of AMATYC [American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges], and (2) we have begun some research around sustainability. We’re looking at the constructs of psychological ownership from organizational research to see how it applies here.    

• Shandy Hauk (San Fransisco State University) gave up an update on the project entitled Professional Resources & Inquiry in Mathematics Education (PRIMED): PRIMED is about doing professional development with faculty online, in an asynchronous course, where faculty work together in teams to learn more about teaching [math to] people who will one day be elementary school teachers. The project has finished the field test of this online course, and we’re preparing now to have an August webinar in 2020 to let people know how it went, what we did, and how to get more information. The announcement will come out through the MAA. January’s DUE Point post has more background on PRIMED.

• Nick Long (Stephen F. Austin University) provided an update on the Calculus in Virtual Reality project, featured on DUE Point in October 2019. The most up to date information on the CalcVR project can be found on our website https://calcvr.org. We are currently looking to update many of the lessons and demos to help students focus on the most critical elements. Another lesson we have learned on this project is that the formative assessments can (and should) help you improve weak points and accentuate strengths. Don’t be afraid to test, measure, and adapt!   

• Finally, Taylor McNeill (Vanderbilt University) pointed out that the Challenging, Operationalizing, and Understanding Racialized and Gendered Events (COURAGE) in Undergraduate Mathematics project has entered a new phase of data collection using focus groups. Read more about the COURAGE project here.  

Many thanks to all of the poster presenters for providing these updated snapshots of their projects. For the full list of past DUE Point posts, visit the main Math Values page: https://www.mathvalues.org/duepoint. 

Katie Haymaker is a co-editor of DUE Point and an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Villanova, where her research interests include coding theory and mastery-based testing in undergraduate mathematics courses.

*Responses in this blog were edited for length and clarity.