New Article: Empowering Students (and Faculty): Using Math to Make a Difference
Posted by MAA Focus on May 13, 2025
As someone who is concerned about the impacts of climate change. I wanted to find a way to connect my interest in sustainability with my role as a mathematics professor. My solution was to develop a course called Math Modeling and Sustainability. To give my students the opportunity to apply their math (and other) skills to solving actual real-world problems, the course includes a community-based learning component: student teams partner with community organizations to analyze an issue of sustainability of interest to the partner. In this article I describe a sampling of these community projects, covering topics such as food waste, alternative energy heating systems, electric vehicles and solar panels.
This article was written by Victor Donnay, Professor of Mathematics at Bryn Mawr College.
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