We just spent the day at Roslyn High School (picture below) to begin our first pilot study of Hands-On Calculus with more than 100 students! Roslyn has a total of five calculus classes, four of which will be taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams in May, and all five will be using our textbook. Roslyn previously made headlines with its iPad initiative, but Hands-On Calculus is the first digital math textbook the school is adopting. And during the demos, some teachers even asked for copies of our other titles (Trigonometry and Hands-On Precalculus) for their students.
One great moment from today came when students in one of the AP classes saw one of our interactives involving a moving car (first derivative = speed, second derivative = acceleration, etc.). One student excitedly blurted out that he was learning the same things in his physics course. We set the car to have a linearly increasing speed on the demo iPad, which was being projected to the class, and asked the student what the car's position would look like as a function of time. He said it would accelerate. Bingo:
They've got some really smart kids at Roslyn, and as the year progresses we'll be getting a lot of feedback from them, and we'll be able to make our content even better for them and all our users. We're looking forward to our continued partnership with the Roslyn schools, and to more pilot studies down the road!
