Posts

Playthings I

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Good weather on Monday caused me to set aside the plan to show Physci 154 The Universe is a Simulation . I opted to run a playthings exercise using Djubi slingballs . I did suggest that the launch angle be kept relatively constant, whatever angle a group chose.  Rulers were used to measure the pull distance, the 30 meter tape measure was used to measure flight distances.  Malachi is the puller, Ian will measure the pull distance I eventually settled on recommending groups of four: a slingball puller, someone to hold the ruler, a data recorder, and one member downrange to retrieve the slingball. The pull distance measurement Stella is a downrange slingball retriever Siniann looks at where the slingball has landed, Leriangelica is recording data using her phone The class had a special guest today Measuring the flight distances The layout had the downside that s...

Site swap mathematics

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Site swap mathematics is a chance to expand the concept of what constitutes a mathematical model. Site swap mathematics is not something taught in the usual stack of mathematics, as if there is only one path and that path is from addition to calculus. While one might argue that site swap mathematics has no useful application, neither do quadratic equations for the elementary school pre-teacher program majors or for my agriculture and natural resources program majors. Neither are going to have to factor a quadratic equation to get through their working day. Site swap is no more useless than most of the other math they have been exposed to after eighth grade.  The board starts off as seen above. Without any further background I ask the students what letter comes next (filled in above already) or what color comes next. The use of red, green, and blue is intentional as this may bring up memories of the primary colors of light, acting as a distractor. Continuing ...

Student evaluations

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Student evaluations of instructor, course, and course materials provide guidance for the institutions on areas of relative strengths and areas where there may be room for improvement. Bearing in mind that old data is not usefully actionable data, the intent of this report is to convey broad themes emerging in the evaluations to decision makers as rapidly as possible.  This report presumes familiarity with the student evaluations form in use at the institution. The responses were converted to numeric values: Strongly disagree: 1 Disagree: 2 Neutral: 3 Agree: 4 Strongly agree: 5 The number of student responses by term is seen above.  The differences are small between the terms. Due to the large sample sizes the differences are technically statistically significant, but the effect sizes are small to very small. At best the data only hints at the possibility that student ratings may be slightly lower this fall.  As noted in the past, students tend to respond with agree or str...