Bio

Jason earned a bachelor’s in math education from Northern Michigan University and a master’s in applied mathematics from Michigan Technological University, where he currently works as a lecturer in the mathematics department. Jason runs a Mathematica-based math lab where students learn Mathematica as a tool to explore and deepen their understanding of mathematics.

Project: Tools for Teaching an Online Course with Mathematica

My project will be to put together a suite of tools to help educators leverage the power of Mathematica to teach online courses more effectively and efficiently.

Assessment Tools:
I will design a tool that allows students to access Mathematica behind a lockdown browser while taking exams. This tool is extremely important in that it will allow us to assess a curriculum based on computation.

Proctoring Management:
Students in an online course often have to make arrangements to have their exams proctored. An instructor has to organize this information and corresponding communication between the instructor, student and proctor. I will optimize this process by using Wolfram products. Specifically, I will create a form that is deployed in the cloud that will take the student’s proctor information and feed it to the Wolfram Data Drop. Next, I will create a notebook that will import the data and send out appropriate communications to the students and proctors.

Educational Content:
I will create the first chapter of a Computable Document Format (CDF)-based textbook for introductory differential equations.