After ten months of work, faculty members of the Math Department and students in calculus courses succeeded in compiling a total of 3,000 BC Calculus problems that will be shared with students all around the world as a Khan Academy AP BC Calculus course. Since the unofficial launch of the BC Calculus course last summer, 2,850 of these problems have already been sequentially uploaded on the Khan Academy website, according to Bill Scott, Instructor and Chair in Mathematics. The rest of the problems will be proof-read by David Penner, former Instructor in Mathematics at Andover, for errors. They hope the problems will be uploaded onto the website within the next couple of weeks, Scott said. “We’ve created a resource that’s free and available to the world, and the coolest thing is that our problems are being tried by hundreds of thousands of kids from everywhere,” said Scott. The idea to form a collaboration between Andover and Khan Academy originated over a year ago by Head of School John Palfrey and Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, according to Scott. “The biggest thing I hope [students] will take away from this project is [an] understanding of what [Andover] means when saying we are ‘a private school with a public purpose.’ I hope they will reflect on how lucky they are to be at a place with this level of education and resources,” said Patrick Farrell, current Dean of Faculty and former Chair in Mathematics. According to Scott, feedback from Khan Academy about the calculus course has been positive, and the Math Department and Khan Academy hope to explore other courses together, including AP Statistics and a multivariable calculus and linear algebra course.
