Many calculus students have difficulty with power series questions. This session will examine explorations of power series using the TI-89 and precalculus techniques that help students understand how to generate and use power series to represent functions. Classroom ready handouts will be provided.

Areas of mathematics education involved with this paper: problem solving, use of technology, classroom practices, rich learning tasks, and improving curriculum.

The goals of this session are to demonstrate how we can use calculator technology, computer algebra, and precalculus mathematics to generate power series that model functions. We will develop power series models that are normally introduced only at the calculus level. We believe that many calculus students have difficulties with power series because they must learn power series and calculus techniques simultaneously. If they had a better understanding of power series before applying them in calculus they would have more success learning this topic. This session will share several handouts that use calculator explorations of power series. We will discuss typical student questions that arise from these investigations. We will describe how to generate additional investigations that are suitable for your classes. We encourage participants to actively question and share.