Hello, readers! This is Sierra Milosh speaking. Or maybe rather, this was me speaking during my senior year at Appalachian State University. I am graduating this May of 2017 with a General Mathematics degree and a concentration in sustainability. You might be asking yourself how in the world these two fields relate. This was my very same question when I was first beginning to get interested in living sustainably: "how can I take what I have learned in my mathematics courses and begin to apply them towards what I am passionate about?" Any math major will be able to tell you that math does not fit neatly in the realm of pure theory; it infiltrates every moment, every aspect of our entire lives.
Dr. Katrina Palmer, my mentor/hero and a mathematics professor at Appalachian, is the entire reason I began to explore the crossover between math and sustainability. Together we decided to take our personal strengths and our shared interests and create a project together. You are currently looking at our final expression of a year's worth of work. The idea was simple: how can we get more students involved with sustainable living who might never have been exposed? How can we reach the students who might never set foot in the Sustainable Development department, and how can we represent information to them in a way that they will understand?
The goal of our project was to take something that thousands of students groan over every year, Calculus, and through problems that we created, subtly introduce sustainability concepts in a way that was engaging for the students. We created a problem or two for each week's Calculus topic that revolved around something to do with sustainability, and we implemented these problems into six different Calculus I courses, taught by three different professors at ASU. Our revised problems and solutions can be found under the Topics tab at the top of this screen. We hope that teachers will use these questions in future courses to raise more awareness on sustainability issues, and we of course encourage creative development of any future math problems! If you would like to share your sustainability-related problems or ideas with us, or if you have any questions or concerns about our process, please contact us!
We were also curious to know how students felt about the entire experience. Did our calculus questions teach them something about sustainability that they didn't know before the semester began? Were the sustainability-based problems more enjoyable to work through than other problems in the course? Did attitudes about sustainability or even student action change over the course of the semester? Did the students' attitudes about math change over the course of the semester? To begin to answer some of these questions, we introduced two surveys at the beginning and at the end of the semester for the students to answer on a voluntary basis. To read more about the surveys, please visit our Survey tab at the top of this screen.