Example Generation Exercises in an Introductory Analysis Course

In this article we describe how we systematically included example generation exercises into our introductory Analysis course and explain our motivation for doing so. Feedback on these exercises collected from 39 students via course evaluation questionnaires is presented. We also provide examples taken from one-to-one interviews with seven students of how engaging with the exercise caused two students to expand their concept images of divergent sequence and resulted in three students developing techniques for generating certain types of sequences. The merits of incorporating these exercises into an advanced mathematics course are discussed.