I’m having my older son read a few chapters of Steven Strogatz’s Infinite Powers this summer. We did a calculus course last school year so he has seen some of these calculus concepts before. I’m finding it both fun and fascinating to review some of the ideas with him – there were always lots of ways to review and freshen up the pre-calc ideas, but I still looking for good ways to do that with the ideas from calculus.
Anyway, think of this project as representing with a high school student with a year of calculus under his belt has to say about some of the main ideas from the course.
So, I had him read chapter 6 this morning – here are his initial thoughts:
I asked him to pick two ideas from chapter to talk about. The first idea he wanted to talk about was “instantaneous speed.” Here’s what he took away from the chapter:
The second thing he wanted to talk about was the “Usain Bolt” problem. This part of Strogatz’s book has received a lot of attention – here’s an article in Quanta Magazine, for example:
Quanta Magazine’s article about Infinite Powers
Here’s what my son had to say about the problem:
I’m always really interested to hear kids describe math concepts, but I’m not used to hearing kids talk through Calculus ideas. Hopefully we’ll have some fun over the next few years finding ways to review the main ideas. Probably Infinite Powers will be a great resource!
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