INTEGRATING SONIFICATION INTO CALCULUS INSTRUCTION

The primary goal of this proof-of-concept project is to improve student learning and success rate in calculus by integrating sonification throughout a calculus course. Between February 2005 and February 2008, we will: • Design laboratory activities in which students use sonification to explore and apply calculus. • Design classroom activities that build on the laboratory activities, so that sound is a ubiquitous representation of mathematics, just as graphics, numerics, and symbolics are now. • Measure the impact of these laboratory and classroom sonification activities on student learning and success rate in calculus. In this paper, we present an overview of our project and model activities to the sonification community. We present this information early in our project, hoping to generate discussion that will help us refine our goals and methods for making sonification an effective calculus learning tool. 1