Preface Features of the Text

Instructors and students alike will find several consistent features in the presentation, including:

Motivating Questions

At the start of each section, we list 2–3 motivating questions that provide motivation for why the following material is of interest to us. One goal of each section is to answer each of the motivating questions.

Preview Activities

Each section of the text begins with a short introduction, followed by a preview activity. This brief reading and the preview activity are designed to foreshadow the upcoming ideas in the remainder of the section; both the reading and preview activity are intended to be accessible to students in advance of class, and indeed to be completed by students before a day on which a particular section is to be considered.

Activities

A typical section in the text has at least three activities. These are designed to engage students in an inquiry-based style that encourages them to construct solutions to key examples on their own, working individually or in small groups.

Exercises

There are dozens of college algebra and trignometry texts with (collectively) tens of thousands of exercises. Rather than repeat standard and routine exercises in this text, we recommend the use of WeBWorK with its access to the Open Problem Library and many thousands of relevant problems. In this text, each section simply includes as well as 3–4 challenging exercises per section. Each has multiple parts, requires the student to connect several key ideas, and expects that the student will do at least a modest amount of writing to answer the questions and explain their findings.

Graphics

As much as possible, we strive to demonstrate key fundamental ideas visually, and to encourage students to do the same.

Interactive graphics

Many of the ideas of how functions behave are best understood dynamically; java applets offer an often ideal format for investigations and demonstrations. Desmos provides a free and easy-to-use online graphing utility that we occasionally link to and often direct students to use. Thanks to David Austin, there are also select interactive javascript figures within the text itself.

Summary of Key Ideas

Each section concludes with a summary of the key ideas encountered in the preceding section; this summary normally reflects responses to the motivating questions that began the section.