MOSAIC Calculus

Published

October 13, 2024

This is the home page for MOSAIC Calculus and serves only to steer the reader to items that will be of direct interest.

MOSAIC Calculus involves three main components:

  1. The most up-to-date version of the MOSAIC Calculus textbook.
  2. The MOSAIC Calculus Workbook.
  3. An R package, {mosaicCalc}, available via CRAN, the official distribution network for R.

Almost certainly anyone using this site will want to bookmark directly the textbook and the Workbook.

Workbook

The MOSAIC Calculus Workbook contains all the exercises, reading questions, projects, and review materials for the textbook. These are arranged chapter-by-chapter.

Some sections are currently in draft form. These will be updated over 2024-2025 on this same site.

The Workbook is equipped with a light-weight system to support students getting immediate feedback for selected multiple-choice questions. At the instructor’s discretion, system can also be used to collect student answers via, say, a Google Form that is private to the instructor. From there, R and the {devoirs} package can be used to tabulate and score student work, chapter by chapter.

The {devoirs} package also makes it straightforward for instructors to write their own materials that can work with the student-collection system.

Note again … the textbook does not contain exercises. All exercises are in the Workbook. The impetus for this arrangement is two fold:

  1. Exercises are added or revised much more frequently than the textbook itself. Putting them in a separately managed project makes it easier to arrange for individual instructors to create their own documents that provide compatible answer-collection facilities. (Contact dtkaplan@gmail.com for more information on setting this up.)

  2. The {devoirs} package, which provides the automated answer-collection system, isn’t used directly in the textbook, just in the Workbook.

Computing

The R language is integrated into MOSAIC Calculus textbook and the Workbook. There are two main ways to access the R engine for interacting with the textbook and workbook.

  1. The textbook and workbook both integrate the R computational engine into the HTML files accessed by the browser. This means there is no need to setup software or manage R packages. I think this will be the preferred mode for almost all students.

  2. Any R system such as the desktop RStudio or the posit.cloud service, can be used. This mode requires installing the R packages that the books make use of. The following command will do the job (which also includes installing many other widely used packages):

install.packages("mosaicCalc")

Mode (2) will be preferred by those creating documents for their own courses and those who include Quarto/RMarkdown editing in their courses.


The 2022 version, now obsolete, is available here. This is relevant only to US Air Force Academy faculty (not students!) who need to translate web links from teaching materials used in 2022.