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AI Assisted Feedback in Moodle

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April 15  Laboratory reports in two courses are marked with rubrics. This is an exploration of the capabilities of AI assisted feedback ( AIF ) in Moodle 4.5. The AIF plug-in was configured in practice mode in assignments for both courses.  The first example is from SC 250 Botany, a thin layer chromatography analysis of plant pigments. The laboratory report is marked using a rubric as seen below.    The prompt given is seen below along with setting up Generate feedback automatically on submission for Practice mode, which is the formative feedback mode for AIF.   For AIF to use the rubric, the Grading Method must be set to rubric. For Practice mode, the marking workflow must be set to No, which effectively turns off the practice mode. There is a summative Teacher-Reviewed mode that involves a different set of settings.         The following is an example from SC 130 Physical Science Ohm's law laboratory exercise. This laboratory is also...

Periodic table day one

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Day one opened with Hydrogen  Ptable was on the Smartboard  Hydrogel to Helium  Lithium at 12:40, Neon in the final five month  The shatterball was a spinning electron

12.3 FSM Family Health and Safety Study data exploration

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In chapter 12.3 the textbook recommends considering the statistical tools that you already know how to use. You can be 95% confident that the instructor has chosen a problem that can be resolved by the tools taught in the course. In the "wild" there are many more tools to consider. F-tests for a difference of variances (standard deviations), confidence intervals for a slope, tests for differences of medians, tests for normality, or Bayesian credible interval. All of these are beyond the scope of this introductory course. Thus the student is left with basic statistics (chapters one, two, three), correlations (chapter four), confidence intervals (chapter nine), hypothesis tests against a known mean (chapter ten), and tests for a difference in two sample means (chapter eleven). Those are the tools that have been covered, in the course an open data exploration exercise is limited to using those same tools.  The course features reduced content to provide more time for data explor...

Legends and stories of plants in ethnobotany

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Not one single student had a plant legend or story to share. Not one knew any. The destruction of languages, cultural knowledge, and cultural practices by social media has happened so quickly that in the future historians will be baffled at the rapidity of the mass extinction. 

Electricity and Ohm's Law

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 On Monday Power Comes in Many Forms was shown to provide the segue into voltage and current on Wednesday. Fall 2025 the class did not make it to see the solar panel output display, so this term everything was done on the Smartboard using the presentation . This permitted moving through the material more quickly.  The solar panel display, however, is down yet again. This time partially down. I never had the chance to show the students. But the Watts per square meter is still available.  An earlier image provides conversion capabilities. 0.89 kW/m² generates 102.7 kW of DC with 96.5 kW of AC output. So 1.08 kW/m² would generate 124.6 kW. The loss on conversion to AC is 6.04 percent. 124.6 kW of DC input produced 117 kW of AC power on the output side at a loss of 6.04%. Enough to run roughly 15 cup 117 rice cookers Thursday dawned aa a fourth cloudless day with moisture still hanging in the morning air. Alisha enters data, Meraia sets ...

Botany lab 13 Chromatography failure

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The Chromatography laboratory failed spectacularly.  Every single plate, with three different plate types, looked like this. The solvent above was 70% ethyl alcohol. The pasty white appearance is likely a result of too much calcium carbonate.  Most of the class used 91% isopropyl alcohol with a result seen as above. Ethyl alcohol was used successful last year. 70% isopropyl alcohol was also used successfully last year.  Perhaps the plant leave mix was problematic. Alternanthera sessifolia was the dominant plant in the mix. Some Codiaeum variegatum and Cordyline fruticosa leaves were added in. Last year only Alternanthera sessifolia was used. Was that contributory to the issues?   The calcium carbonate was locally sourced. Was too much added? Not enough? About a half to one teaspoon was used. Perhaps there were impurities in the calcium carbonate. The use of an eye dropper tended to create larger blobs, but n...

Google Sheets one function to rule them all and in the darkness bind them

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I first began using the spreadsheet software Lotus 1-2-3 in 1986 and have memorized and mastered an ever increasing number of spreadsheet functions over the decades since. Google has introduced a new AI function in Google Sheets that acts like the one ring in the Lord of the Rings: one function that rules all other functions.  I spend a couple of weeks in MS 150 Statistics covering the normal distribution, standard error of the mean, t-distribution and t-critical, and 95% confidence intervals. The students learn to calculate the mean, the standard deviation, the standard error of the mean, t-critical, and then the lower and upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval. The Google AI function replaces all spreadsheet functions with a single function () and a prompt inside the function. Tell the function what you want, and the function constructs the functions that give you the answer. I have only entered a prompt inside the new AI function in cell C1 with data in column A of the...