Traditional college algebra has been taught at Francis Marion University since before the school's establishment as a four-year institution in 1970. The majority of students performed poorly in these courses. We initially tried an experiment using applications and projects to motivate the college algebra. We integrated real-world problems in the form of projects, applications, and activities to motivate students to better understand the principles of algebra. Performance improved and feedback from most of the students was positive. Based on the overall positive experience, two new freshmen algebra courses were added using modeling and problem-solving as their framework.

In this paper, we discuss courses, our salesmanship, a few illustrative examples of the applications/projects used, and student comments.

Introduction

Typical of most liberal arts curricula, the college algebra course at Francis Marion University was designed to achieve mastery in (intermediate) algebra. Currently, the traditional course is offered as either a self-paced course or as a lecture course. In these courses, the mastery of manipulation skills is the focus. These skills generally include as a minimum: operations of numbers, linear equations, inequalities on a number line, polynomials and their operations, factoring, simplification of expressions, exponents and their simplification, radicals, rational functions, exponential functions, and logarithms. We asked ourselves if all these skills are important and if so, for what reason? Mathematics professors know that these skills are very perishable.