Enhancing calculus learning via a student-centred web project

Calculus is not a subject that interests many students. However, it is an important fundamental subject to a broad range of education courses particularly, engineering, physics and information technology. This research looks into ways to instill and enhance the interest of students to Calculus using a student-centered web project. In this research, students who were taking the subject Calculus were divided into groups and were assigned to a web project in addition to the conventional lectures and tutorials. This project basically requires students to develop websites to present their modeling and integration application of their chosen product. They are required to derive the cross-section and volume of the product and then validate their results. This project aims to connect the contents in the Calculus course with the real world whereby a problem from the real world was introduced and solved using Calculus techniques. Two surveys were conducted, one at the beginning of the course and the other at the end of the course, to determine whether the approach which combined the teacher-centred approach and the student-centred learning approach have enhanced their understanding and learning of Calculus. The analysis of results from the survey indicated that the addition of the group project enhanced the student learning and also enriched their learning experience.