Anytime you can use real life examples in teaching is a positive experience for the students. Studying the cars on the track and translating the data from runs will help the students learn how calculus has many uses. |
It's a lot better when they are running. You can smell the fuel. You can smell the burnt rubber. Ideally, the students can feel, hear, see and smell how calculus works. |
This is the big picture. The rest of the year they will see how (the calculus) works. |
We use the derivative to find that a rate of change of distance is velocity and we use integral to find that the area under a velocity curve will give us distance. |