About me:
I am a former teacher and professor who is still interested in seeing that math and cs education improved for ALL students, but I am particularly focused on making sure that talented underrepresented students interested in STEM, especially math and computer science, don't continue to be under resourced. My original mission was to directly teach underrepresented students or to teach mainstream students and find a way to volunteer to teach underrepresented students. Now my mission is simply to provide resources to all students and a special warning to underrepresented students that the educational systems in place have a very strong track record of seeing to it that you DON'T advance to more advanced mathematics and therefore they generally cannot be trusted. In short, I'm more of a whistleblower now, and we all know how popular whistleblowers are.
About the site:
The content of this page and the subpages is similar to the original EricksonEducation site that I maintained to showcase my and my students work at Chicago State University.
While knowing almost nothing, with considerable help from a former colleague, I installed Linux, Java, Apache, Mathematica and webMathematica on an old pc. I don't remember the details exactly, but webMathematica would use Apache Tomcat to serve up little flash animations using java servlets to the client browser so that you could have interactive animations. At the time it was cutting edge, as this was before the proliferation of clouds and the Wolfram cloud in particular, and also before advances in javascript/html 5 and browsers became more powerful. Unfortunately, the university would not allow the linux box through the firewall so this turned out to be useless except as a learning experience. Undaunted, I took the lemons and made lemonade and paid a kid to teach me how to make a computer in order to maximize the learning experience. I was always curious what this entailed and figured that you probably shouldn't teach computer science classes unless you have built a computer. That actually isn't really true and it turns out to be easy once you have someone telling you exactly what to do or they just do the harder parts. I then repeated the above software installation sequence and managed to serve up my site from a box in my living room after getting a stable IP from Comcast. These days it's easier to just use the Wolfram cloud, or some similar cloud/tech stack, for all of this. What is the cloud exactly you ask? Just somebody else's computer really.