Students learn math by doing math. Much as I enjoy (and am reasonably talented at) lecturing, it just doesn't work as the primary form of instruction. Getting the students to do the math, with classmates and me nearby. That works. And so I started using active learning. Back when I was a TA in graduate school. And then from the beginning at Augsburg, because my colleagues believed in it too.
I've been teaching discrete mathematics since 1999. Discrete mathematics is a perfect setting to teach mathematical inquiry -- building examples and counterexamples, making conjectures, and justifying conjectures through proof. So, I pivoted to more and more inquiry. This supported my goals of getting students ready for advanced courses in mathematics and computer science and for undergraduate research, and of inspiring students to take more math (or even add a minor or major in math).
But most of all, I wanted my students to see themselves as mathematicians. People who do math and who enjoy doing math. (Well, at least when things work.) And people do math in community, so I recognized the need to build a course that built students' sense of belonging and community. Through the math.
At first I taught from respected published texts (Rosen, Epp, Johnsonbough, etc.). They were filled with all the answers. But, I wanted all the questions so that students could find the answers. My remedy started as handouts for weekly activities (puzzles) and then for daily activities (worksheets). This pile of paper evolved over the years to include inquiry-based exercise sets. Eventually, I had a set of materials that wasn't exactly a text but was good enough to teach from.
But as other faculty at Augsburg and faculty at other schools began to use the materials, I realized we needed an actual text. Better narrative. More examples. And an order that made sense. We began using the new edition in fall 2024, in our calculus-based MAT 302 Discrete Mathematical Structures (mainly for mathematics and computer science majors) and in our algebra-based MAT 202 Discrete Mathematics for Computing (mainly for management information systems majors).
With the encouragement and support of many folks in the PreTeXt community (special thanks to David Farmer, David Austin, Matt Boelkins, and Oscar Levin) and with countless hours of tech support by partner Matthew Richey, in spring/summer 2026 we made the leap to an online text.
Augsburg University