United States Military Academy

Interdisciplinary application projects have been an important part of the curriculum at the United States Military for more than a decade. The relevance of such projects has increased as the lines separating distinct academic disciplines have blurred through the continued employment of technology. While problem solving processes and course specific problem solving tools are embedded in the curriculum, getting students to articulate their results in the form of a technical report has been a continuing challenge. Clear and concise written communication skills are critical given the effectiveness of the project development and analysis is only obtained by communicating those ideas to others. Incoming students, particularly freshman students, do not possess the background and skills associated with a quality technical report. Providing templates and outlines of report format has yielded only marginal results. This talk addresses a recent approach to target student's written and oral communication about mathematics through piecewise submissions. Projects are divided into distinct, though interrelated pieces, so as not to overwhelm the student with a large requirement, that culminate to a fully developed and analyzed project. Following each piece submission, students receive feedback, make corrections, and resubmit their revised piece along with the next project piece due. Since the instructor helped the student walk-thru their first project, subsequent projects could be handled by the student more efficiently. The goal of the piecewise project is an iterative development building towards, as an endstate, a quality technical report the student can reference in the future. This talk will include project construction, timelines, constraints, lessons learned as well as student feedback.