MATH A251 · Calculus I · Fall 2026

A student-facing course notebook for interactive calculus learning and short explanations built from questions in this class.

The live site is published at https://jjohnson-47.github.io/math251-fall2026-site/. Its first experiment lets students time an accelerating ball between two movable gates, then squeeze the gates together to discover an instantaneous rate of change.

This is a companion site. The course LMS remains the authority for announcements, deadlines, submissions, and grades.

What is in the foundation

• A mobile-first React course home with a keyboard- and touch-operable ball-and-gates experiment.
• Shareable /play and /explainers routes, plus a hand-authored explainer template with stable section anchors.
• MDX course content with build-time MathJax CHTML, semantic assistive MathML, local fonts, and linked equation regions.
• A typed math layer with tests for motion, gate timing, difference quotients, and boundary cases.
• Vinext and Vite for React Server Components, route handlers, and library integrations.
• Tailwind CSS and reusable shadcn interface primitives.
• Two build targets: a static GitHub Pages publication and a worker-capable build for future APIs.
• Formatting, linting, type checking, math tests, dependency updates, and automatic deployment.
• Agent instructions that protect course truth, student privacy, accessibility, and mathematical correctness.

Local development

Use Node.js 24 and npm.

npm ci
npm run dev

Useful checks:

npm run check       # format, lint, types, and math tests
npm run build       # worker-capable production build
npm run ci          # checks plus the GitHub Pages export

Publishing model

Every push to main runs the verification suite and publishes dist/client to GitHub Pages. Pull requests run the same checks and static build without deploying.

The normal npm run build keeps the server runtime available for route handlers such as app/api/health/route.ts. The npm run build:pages target intentionally exports a static student site; server-only routes are not included in that artifact. This keeps the public course page fast and durable while preserving a clean path to API-backed learning tools on a worker host.

Where new work belongs

• app/: pages, layouts, metadata, and server route handlers.
• components/: course interactions and shared interface composition.
• components/ui/: installed interface primitives; compose these before creating replacements.
• lib/: tested math, data, and integration logic with no presentation concerns.
• content/: source material and content-authoring notes.
• public/: downloadable student artifacts and share assets.
• tests/: deterministic checks for mathematical and content logic.

Read AGENTS.md before agentic work and docs/architecture.md before adding a new route, API, or learning-tool family.

Instructor/design handoffs that contain private course context stay local and ignored. Implement only their approved public conclusions; never add source student material to this repository.