2026 Edition
The 2026 edition is an overhaul of the 2024 PreTeXt source, with a laundry list of improvements.
Activities
Perhaps the single most replicated finding in all of educational research is that students learn when they do things, rather than by passively listening to or reading information. The chief contribution of this edition, the new Activities in Chapters 1-5, engage students in the work of the classroom.
- Each section begins with an Opening Activity suitable for pre-class homework or in-class warmup. These Opening Activities remind students of something important from a previous section, introduce a key new idea, or refresh their memory of something they learned in K-12.
- In parallel with the running example in each section, inline Activities gently lead students through (usually) Exercise 1 in the workbook. These Activities are suitable for in-class work individually or in small groups.
Workbook improvements
The workbook accompanying the main text is a key part of JEA's approach. Designed to be printed and written on, it contains Exercises 1-4 from each section, rendered with writing space for each task, graph paper, and formula references. The 2026 edition improves the workbook in several ways:
- A common task across most of the problems in this book is to name the variables. For each of the related quantities in a story, students identify a letter name, write a description in everyday words, identify the units, and decide on dependence. We've now included a scaffolding table to help students remember all the parts of the name-the-variables task.
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Another common pattern of thought in this text is successive approximation (or "fancy guess and check," as one of my students called it). Through repeatedly evaluating a function and comparing the result to a desired value, we can produce approximate solutions to equations even without knowing the algebraic methods for exact solutions. We've now included a scaffolding table for successive approximation tasks to help students remember what we mean.
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By borrowing some space from the top and bottom margins, we've included even more writing space on each page.
Ease-of-use and accessibility
- Each section is now broken into several subsections; PreTeXt automatically generates links to each subsection for easier navigation and direction.
- Most diagrams are now rendered in PreFigure, a free and open-source system for creating diagrams that are accessible to screen readers and can be easily rendered in a tactile format.
Coming soon
As I teach from this book in the Spring 2026 semester, I'll be generating more useful resources, including: - typeset solutions to each Activity and Exercise - a static pdf version of the textbook Please be in touch if you have any requests!