Jason Cantarella and National Science Foundation

Jason Cantarella, a professor of mathematics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, received $174,000 from the National Science Foundation to develop curricular materials based on educational robotics, gaming and computer vision for a first-year calculus course. The first semester of the course is based on analyzing a ball-throwing robot. By spinning an arm at a controlled speed and releasing a ball bearing at a precise angle, the robot accurately can toss the bearing several feet into a coffee cup. The project is designed to provide new technology for calculus education, motivate students and contribute to the body of scholarship on educational robotics.