danaleeling

Summer 24 the pre-laying of the centerline was ill-conceived at best and failed miserably. Spring 2024 I forgot to shut down the timer at the end of the run and El Niño winds tore off one of the four sheets. Fall 2023 the timer was in the wrong mode. Summer 2023 the centerline was not held. This term I did not attempt a prelaid centerline. I also went out well ahead of class and made runs up and down the sidewalk practicing timings between walkway poles. I used four sheets again, but waited to lay out the sheets until noon when I had some assistance. Winds were light this term. I moved the paper west to help get a stable line up and running before hitting the paper. Once the class convened I did some timing runs alongside the paper, they were running at about 2 seconds. I did multiple passes before I attempted a single pass. I worked on holding a steady centerline, starting and stopping the timer.    The complication with this layout was that the class did not ...

Without a laboratory this week I opted to focus on the mathematics of playthings. The opening plaything was  intentionally the simplest possible plaything: a bouncing ball and a ruler.  This exercise was an nth bounce exercise which generates a non-linear curve.  Kapualani and Emylia Joann and Angelica Sucie and Morgianna Nakisha and Sinae Sonya and Ray-Annie Morgianna and Darla Sheral Ball bouncing off of an uneven surface Measuring the nth bounce is difficult out beyond the tenth bounce Darsen and Delailah In my mind an actively learning classroom looks like this. Late in the period a student showed me the new linear regression tool in Desmos desktop. The student was working on their phone but using their browser to access Desmos. The app does not yet include this code, so I had not seen this, or perhaps not paid attention to the icon. The tool wou...

Demos graphing calculator on the web (desktop, laptop) includes a regression tool. The tool is not yet in the mobile app. To use the tool on a mobile device use the mobile browser to open: https://www.desmos.com/calculator The regression tool works with tables. The tool is an icon at the upper left side of the table. The tool opens as a linear regression. Other regression options are available. To the right of the equation is an icon that copies the equation out to a new line. Editing that to f(x) notation results in a function that accepts inputs. Note that the above was done on mobile device using the mobile browser, not the Desmos app.  The graph above was autoscaled using the autoscale on the table.

This term a presentation was prepared exhibiting examples of extant material culture from my own photo collection. I also remembered that I have a Chuukese love stick in my desk, so I tucked that in my koahl as well. The lecture opened with the loss of material culture, and the changes wrought by those losses, as exemplified by the koahl I was wearing, and the globally ubiquitous clothes that the students were wearing. After speaking of the losses and the changes these losses have incurred, I used the presentation to show examples of remaining material culture.  Had to bring along the SMARTboard login card. Perhaps the first time at the college that a professor has delivered a SMARTboard presentation while wearing a koahl. A juxtaposition or perhaps more accurately a clash of worlds. 

Failure is always an option. And failure was the result today. Spring 2024  the basic concept was to have them try to hoop, essentially not do well, show them how to hoop, and then use a paired t-test for a difference in the number of rotations from before to after. There were two complications with this plan. The first was a very small sample size. The second was that some students already knew how to hoop. The result was a statistically insignificant difference and thus an invalidation of calculating Cohen's effect size d.  Desmos Failure at this scale does not happen for instructors of algebra.  Spreadsheet Only three men showed up for class this morning. Opting to keep sample sizes equal, only three women were asked to hoop. The small sample size doomed this effort from the get go. For future reference, should a third attempt be foolishly made to find a way to use hula hoops to demonstrate Cohen's effect size d, thirty seconds is actually too long, unnecessarily long....

Monday opened with the usual weather sites and terminology coverage. The Nissan made a return to the parking lot for the first time this term  The climate change playlist was updated with an altered focus. A new Curiosity Stream video on the environmental effects of climate change led the list. That was followed by a recent documentary, Inside Vanuatu : A country being lost to rising levels by channel 4 news. The video was told from the point of view of 24-year-old Grace Malie, a Rising Nations Initiative youth delegate for Tuvalu. I felt that this video would connect better than the usual string of science videos. I then let a pre-existing video in the list wrap up with a report on record breaking heat.  This term a new song titled Clouds led off the Thursday clouds playlist . Another new addition was a recent StarTalk video on clouds that was used to preface the 8:00 AM class, essentially a stall to buy time for other students...

I went with the light blue marbles for no particular reason. Although the mean for the marbles is typically between 5.1 and 5.2 grams, a split based on that yielded too few heavy marbles. The light blue marbles split roughly 27 light and 24 heavy on a split between 5.0 and 5.1. Marbles 5.0 or lighter on one side 5.1 or heavier on the other. Spring term I excluded 5.0 and 5.1 marbles, but that also necessitated using a mix of colors. And that eliminated the finding that students might be able to detect differences of 0.1 grams. Spring term had a very small sample size which actually proved educational as the seventh student stopped the p-value below 0.05. That said, the spring term also came within one pair of a 100% success rate which would be too good a result in some sense. I want something that has a sense that random luck achieved whatever result was obtained.  At 13 students the p-value was 0.09 and we failed to reject the null hypothesis. ...