Introductory Blog Post
Ryan T -
Hello! My name is Ryan, and I’ve long held a fascination with 3D printing and engineering in general. Going into this project, I wanted to research something related to 3D printing and STEM.
During planning, I remembered discussing creating 3D printed math teaching aides with one of my math club teacher advisors, Mr. Montcalm, a few months earlier. I then did some research and found that while some research has been done to show that 3D printed math aides do improve students’ learning outcomes in various fields, there has been little research regarding advanced math classes such as Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus AB.
I will spend the ten weeks of my senior project first 3D modeling and 3D printing Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus AB teaching aides, specifically to teach the concepts of Riemann Sums and Disks and Washers. Then, I will teach two Calculus AB classes, both taught with the same video including a 3D visualization component, but only one having the physical 3D aid to pass around.
Students will then take a brief multiple-choice survey designed to test comprehension of the subject. The survey will also include a few questions to test general comprehension of Calculus concepts to see the baseline knowledge that students have of the course. Then, the scores will be anonymized with each student receiving a randomized ID with no correlation to their legal or preferred names. Only the anonymized version of these will be received for data analysis to be included in this project.
The difference in scores between these two groups will be recorded. The average score percentage improvement will be calculated and evaluated for statistical significance within a p-value of 0.05. Scores may be sorted by how well students did on the general calculous questions.
For ethical purposes, the students who did not receive the aid component of instruction will be offered the opportunity to receive the aid component after taking the survey to ensure they do not miss out on any benefits. Additionally, the students who did not participate in the survey will have access to the questions for practice.
3D printing may be able to provide effective and affordable mathematics teaching aids. This senior project will experimentally investigate if 3D printed aids significantly assist in teaching advanced mathematics like Calculus.
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