Introduction

In our college, we teach a quick, one-credit Calculus Workshop course for students who have received credit for taking first-semester calculus elsewhere (in high school or at another college) but who need a brief introduction to some specific topics they may not have seen before. And so we spend one class on using a computer algebra system, one class on Euler's Method, one class on writing about mathematics … a whirlwind tour of a variety of topics our regular Calculus I students see in more depth. The class meets for one hour and fifteen minutes twice a week during the first half of the semester.

Even in such a condensed course, we want our students to learn something about the history of calculus, and especially about the most famous names associated with its beginnings. They have encountered Isaac Newton's name in solving a murder mystery (Newton's Law of Cooling) and in studying air resistance for a falling body (Newton's Laws of Motion), but few of them know much about his role in the discovery of calculus — and most of them have never even heard of Gottfried Leibniz. Students in our regular calculus sequence read, discuss and write about several articles on the development of the calculus from [2] and [4], but we do not have that luxury in the workshop course. And so on the last day of class, we take a quick dive into the history of the subject. The activity described in this article introduces students to the lives and work of Newton and Leibniz in a way that includes active student participation, collaboration, and the use of technology — in one class period.