Meeting Abstract
Almost everyone has experience with cancer in their family or friends, and this can provide students with motivation sufficient to overcome their fear of mathematical models to investigate further. In the active classroom, students first learn about the biology of some particular cancer, and then work together to translate that understanding into a mathematical model. This process always demands answers to new and unexpected questions that the class can investigate as a whole, and delivers a powerful message about the power of model-building as tool for clear thinking. The hard work that goes into building their own model works like nothing else to make students want to learn whatever mathematical and computational techniques they need to see what their model predicts. We will attempt to work through this whole process, although rather quickly, starting by breaking into groups to discuss and then combine our knowledge of some particular cancer, working as a large group to construct a model, identifying some unknowns, hitting the smartphones to pin them down, and thinking about how we would modify the model and use it to open up new avenues. We’ll conclude with a discussion of the most effective ways to use model-building in the classroom, and of the challenges of working with classes that mix very different levels of mathematical and biological background.
