The proposal aims to design an integrated two semester general education course in mathematics and science. The work will involve two more-or-less separate activities: 1) The revision of a first draft of the mathematical material, relying on results of pilot testing with undergraduates at William and Mary and Norfolk State University and with in- service teachers at ten university sites across the state of Virginia. 2) The construction and piloting of a physics/engineering portion of the material which will directly reference the mathematics encountered by students in the first term. The central theme of the mathematical material is that real engineering data will be used by students who will be asked to solve problems that directly bear on an intuitive grasp of a particular physical setting: Powered aircraft flight. This data is freely available from multiple sources: daily wind data, wind histories, navigation maps and runway plates, weights and dimensions of commercial aircraft and current magnetic declination data. Computations involve arithmetic, elementary algebra, some geometry, some trigonometry, and some use of hand- calculators for numerical integration. Problems are selected because they are elementary. Omitted because of mathematical complexity are many problems that would be part of a standard introduction to aeronautical engineering. The engineering/science part of this work will ask students to obtain some of these data themselves, with a view to getting information that is crucial to the proper function of aircraft. We will also design appropriate experiments to test physical laws that are important to flight. Our entire aim is to convince non-science students that they can enhance their grasp of the outside world by means of elementary calculations and data acquisition.
