To give teams of two or three students an opportunity to work together to solve real-world problems of the kind that professional applied mathematicians are paid to do. To discover the usefulness of discrete deterministic models in areas such as social choice, finance, and population growth. To learn to explain the mathematics that one has used to solve a problem both in formal writing and in oral presentation. The ability to program a computer in a third-generation language like C, Pascal, Basic, Java, or JavaScript is required to do simulations and sometimes to exhaustively search for solutions. A Piagetian approach is used in every class period.
Lectures are minimal, and always after students have engaged the problems that the lectures discuss.