Mathematics Education Foundations : Developing Math Materials for Students and a System for Peer-Educators

Abstract

Learning mathematics is hard, and learning college mathematics is made even harder by textbooks which are primarily used as vessels for homework exercises. These two facts motivated my Senior Integrated Project (SIP) or senior thesis, which consisted of 21 LATEX documents and 5 videos on introductory mathematics topics. The documents were made to be more personalized to the Kalamazoo College curriculum than the all-purpose textbooks often circulated, and with a much larger emphasis on reading comprehension, examples, and conceptual motivations. The thesis also included a system for the creation of more materials in the future, in the hopes that such materials will be made for other subjects and that they will grow as the college does. Following this, I developed a system for the materials’ online and in-person accessibility through the Kalamazoo College Math and Physics Center (MPC).