The Connected Curriculum Project is based on three key ideas.
The material described below illustrates these basic ideas and the way in which we use the technology of the Web to further them.
It illustrates several ways in which students are actively engaged as they use these modules. This module begins with TI-CBL based experimentation with students humming into a microphone and looking at the graphical representation of their hum. They can see, for example, that a low pitched hum is represented by a periodic function with a longer period than a high-pitched hum. They look at movies that demonstrate the visual effects of frequency, amplitude, and phase. These movies give students limited control by moving one slider bar. As soon as JAVA is widely available these movies will be replaced by flashier and more flexible JAVA applets. In either case this demonstrates student activity that is often quite flashy but is also scripted. Later in the same module students open a CAS window. This gives students a more powerful and flexible tool. For example, using Mathematica, students can both see and hear "beats" -- the effect of mixing two signals of slightly different frequency. Finally, this module concludes with a link to physics material on interfernce -- a nice application of phase to physics. Although the link is in place the physics module is not yet complete.
