The SimCalc Project, partially supported for almost ten years by the National Science Foundation, is a research project involving colleagues from several universities, many middle schools, and high schools. Its goal is to use innovative but affordable technology and instructional materials to democratize access to the mathematics of change and variation. It includes, for example, ideas underlying calculus, beginning in the middle school through algebra and onward into university calculus. SimCalc approaches involve a growing mix of visually editable graphs that control dynamic simulations, visualization and data-import tools, and curriculum materials that use these software capabilities, as well as such traditional ones as function graphers. These strategies address the basic ideas of rate, slope as rate, linear functions, simultaneous conditions, interpreting graphs and modeling word problems (including more realistic ones than those that appear in most textbooks), the idea of average, mixture problems, equations, signed numbers and areas, variables and variation, and so on. They also include such ideas as periodicity, velocity and position, and rate and totals connections, including the slope and area ideas underlying the fundamental theorem of calculus.