This First Year Writing assignment builds on narrative skills and introduces students to informational and argumentative writing using minimal primary and secondary research as well as drawing on elements on visual rhetoric.

So far this semester you have reflected on the potential career(s) you are interested in and why you are in college. Now you are going to widen your scope to learn about the major disciplines of humanities, physical sciences, and social sciences that liberal arts courses make up and build on that knowledge to take a look at your possible major and career more specifically. It is important when thinking about a major to understand what job options that field of study can lead to and understand what courses are required. When thinking about a career it is useful to learn what types of positions exist, what skills are needed, and what those job positions are like on a daily basis. It is also equally important to remember that in college a major is not equal to a specific career. This project gives you the chance to explore all of that.

Using the LEGO MINDSTORMS(TM) NXT kit, students construct experiments to measure the time it takes a free falling body to travel a specified distance. Students use the touch sensor, rotational sensor, and the NXT brick to measure the time of flight for the falling object at different release heights. After the object is released from its holder and travels a specified distance, a touch sensor is triggered and time of object's descent from release to impact at touch sensor is recorded and displayed on the screen of the NXT. Students calculate the average velocity of the falling object from each point of release, and construct a graph of average velocity versus time. They also create a best fit line for the graph using spreadsheet software. Students use the slope of the best fit line to determine their experimental g value and compare this to the standard value of g.

This book represents a starting point towards curating and centering marginal voices and non-dominant epistemic stances in open education. It includes the work of 43 diverse authors whose perspectives challenge the dominant hegemony.

This book represents a starting point towards curating and centering marginal voices and non-dominant epistemic stances in open education. It includes the work of 43 diverse authors whose perspectives challenge the dominant hegemony.

This project is unique because English teachers and other faculty volunteered their time over two
years to create this comprehensive and free textbook for students and instructors. This textbook is
an English teacher’s version of a love letter to our students. We love the written word and strive to
infect our students with that shared love and appreciation of language. Also, we have dedicated our
professional lives to help others reach their academic goals, and this textbook is a testament to our
ongoing commitment to help our students succeed and flourish in college and beyond.