A date for your diaries. The annual conference, MSSTL10, will take place in IT Carlow on Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th of May 2010.
The theme of the conference this year is Assessment for Learning in Mathematics and Statistics.
CALL FOR PAPERS:
By March 25th, email a short abstract (200 words maximum) to MSSTL10@itcarlow.ie.
The aims of the conference include:
- providing a forum for practitioners in maths and statistics education to share their ideas in teaching maths and stats as a service subject to various disciplines.
- enabling colleagues to share their experiences, successes and failures in dealing with the myriad of difficulties faced by all who teach mathematics to students with varied mathematical backgrounds.
- presenting new initiatives in teaching and learning.
- giving updates on new developments in the various sectors.
For further details and to keep yourself abreast of the developing programme please check out the conference website at : http://elearn.itcarlow.ie/MSSTL10.htm
Organising Committee:
Dr. Diarmuid Ó Sé diarmuid.ose@itcarlow.ie
Damien Raftery damien.raftery@itcarlow.ie
Conference Email MSSTL10@itcarlow.ie
March 16th, 2010
From Yvonne Diggins at the NDLR
Dear all,
Firstly, we would like to thank you for your continued support and patience throughout the development of a new and more functional NDLR repository.
We are proud to say that the new NDLR Repository is now ready and awaiting the upload of your resources!
You can access and begin the upload of your resources from the following link: https://dspace.ndlr.ie/jspui/
To log in, please follow these steps:
1. Click on the “Login” link to the top right of the page
2. Click on the “Enter NDLR Username & Password” link
3. Click on the “New user? Click here to register” link & follow the instructions
To view interactive videos on uploading & searching the repository, please click on the following two links:
- http://www.ndlr.ie/docs/support/ndlr-search.swf
- http://www.ndlr.ie/docs/support/ndlr-upload-file_demo.swf
We are aiming to have 50 resources uploaded on to the new NDLR Repository by each institution/CoP before the NDLR Event on the 14th April.
If you have any questions, please email the NDLR helpdesk at: helpdesk@ndlr.ie
Best Wishes,
Yvonne
NDLR Helpdesk–
National Digital Learning Repository Project
Email: helpdesk@ndlr.ie – Web: http://www.ndlr.ie/
March 16th, 2010
4th Irish Workshop on Maths Learning and Support Centres – Call for Abstracts
Dear colleagues,
The School of Mathematical Sciences in DCU in conjunction with the Irish Maths Support Network will host the 4th Irish Workshop on Maths Learning and Support Centres on Friday 4th December, 2009. This will be a day-long workshop, with exact times to be confirmed shortly.
The theme of the conference will be “The Use of Technology in Mathematics Support”. Dr. Martin Greenhow
(<http://people.brunel.ac.uk/~mastmmg/>) has agreed to give the keynote address, based on Computer-Aided Assessment for Learning of Elementary Mathematics. An abstract will be available shortly.
In addition, we will have a series of shorter talks (30 minutes in
length) and are inviting speakers to submit abstracts before Friday, 20th November.
There is no registration fee and lunch will be provided. We request that people who plan to attend the conference let us know by Friday, 27th November at the latest by mailing eabhnat.nifhloinn@dcu.ie with your name and affiliation, to allow for planning of refreshments etc.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Best wishes,
Eabhnat Ní Fhloinn
November 11th, 2009
Hi
Again, this is being done in retrospect within a blur of final, FINAL CA attempts, exam marking, exam input, whitesheets and the rest.
Scripts are now marked and the exam board is this afternoon. This is their final exam paper, which had plenty of variety. Those students who attended reasonably well and did their Excel CA and Matlab CA passed OK. Several students missed or bombed their Matlab CA, as discussed in an earlier post and a final attempt was made to give them a chance to pass it. An email was sent to the group last week and any student contacting us was asked to phone/text others in the class to tell them about the repeat opportunity (for 9th June). No student turned up apart from those who did not need to do it. We’ll see them in September no doubt & if I’m feeling really charitable I may be able to squeeze a CA out of some of them before 20th June.
Overview of the Course
On the whole, the module was pretty successful in terms of introducing more applied elements into the course than our previous sem 2 Cert Mechanical Engineering module. The students took quite well to doing stats in Excel and some maths in Matlab and could see the usefulness of both packages.
Ciaran’s students had more success than mine, mainly due to the fact that they did the Matlab CA well (and being a great teacher too of course!). I allowed my students to lose focus a bit by concentrating on the Key Skills element of their assessment and not making them practice the Matlab enough. In future, we will only run one Key Skills session in the lab and make all others run outside their normal class time.
We wanted to introduce the if…then…else construct into the module and used this within a Matlab function to create a piecewise defined function. I’m not sure this worked terribly well, mainly due to extraneous factors like problems with setting the path in Matlab to tell Matlab how to call it. You also can’t discuss domain and range of a function in Matlab very well, due to overloading not requiring you to specify datatypes. I might use Excel VBA next year for this programming element as it would also introduce students to very useful user defined functions in Excel.
We got through the material in the course pretty well. We will shorten the 2D vectors notes a bit. There are lots and lots of examples here and we think it overwhelmed the students a bit, making them believe there was more to it than it looked. Otherwise, 3 teaching hours and one lab worked pretty well for the material covered.
Here is the entire course, with all material that was linked to this blog in previous posts. It is a zipped Moodle course and a README is zipped with it telling you how to install it on your Moodle site. It is a 6mb zipped file, mainly due to two 2mb pdf of exam solutions.
That’s it. I’ll try another Course Story in September & it would be great if you could try one too! If you would like to do something similar contact myself or Eamon Costello and we can set you up with admin rights to create your blog.
Have a great summer
Paul
June 11th, 2009
The 4th Conference on Mathematics (and statistics) Service Teaching will take place on Monday the 25th and Tuesday the 26th of May in Limerick Institute of Technology.
We are delighted to announce that the keynote lecture on “STEM Education in 2020 (or Now ?)” will be presented by Dr Lisa Bullard, North Carolina University state university. Professor John O’Donoghue and Dr George McClelland will give an update on the development of the National Centre for Excellence in Maths and Science teaching and learning (NCE-MSTL). Mr. Bill Lynch, National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA), will give a talk on developments in project maths.
The full programme for the two day conference is available on the conference website: http://www.lit.ie/MSSTL-Conference09/
This two-day conference is a great opportunity to meet friends and colleagues and to share our trials and tribulations in teaching mathematics and statistics to students for whom maths is a compulsory subject on courses in engineering, science, business, computing etc.
The conference dinner on Monday 25th is in Durty Nellies, Bunratty which is less than 15 minutes drive from LIT. A courtesy bus will be available to bring delegates to and from the dinner; the route and times will be announced at the conference
The conference fee is €30 which is payable on arrival. However, those who wish to attend the conference dinner you should send a cheque, made payable to Limerick Institute of Technology, for €65 (€30 for registration and €35 for the dinner) to
Teresa Bradley
Conference in Mathematics (and Statistics) Service Teaching
Limerick Institute of Technology
Moylish Park Campus
Limerick
Online registration is now open at – http://www.lit.ie/MSSTL-Conference09/
The conference is kindly supported by the National Digital Learning Repository (NDLR), the Strategic Initiative Funding (SIF) and Engineers Ireland (IEI)
Organising Committee
Teresa Bradley Teresa.Bradley@lit.ie
Mike O Connell Mike.Oconnell@lit.ie
Liz Fahy Liz.Fahy@lit.ie
Lindy Farmer Lindy.Farmer@lit.ie
Eoin Fitzgerald Eoin.Fitzgerald@lit.ie
Alan Sheehan Alan.Sheehan@lit.ie
Oliver Hyde Oliver.Hyde@lit.ie
Leah Wallace leah.wallace@lit.ie
May 22nd, 2009
Hi
This period covered two computer lab sessions on Tuesday 28th April and Tuesday 5th May. It also covered two 2 hour classes on Wednesday 29th April and Wednesday 6th May, together with two one hour classes on 30th April and 7th May.
Course winding down to a finish this week, so if I’m not photocopying then I’m preparing to photocopy…The usual questions at this point – have you all done the CA’s? Please contact me if you havn’t done the CA’s! Here is an email about the CA’s……it falls on deaf ears mostly, as the people you need to talk to are not in the room and don’t read the email. The students seem comforted by everything being on the Moodle site at least.
On with the classes. We finished the 3 Matlab sessions on Tuesday 28th April covering Matlab functions. This lab also introduced the “If…then…else” programming construct to define a piecewise defined function, which the students then plot. Several students were still finishing Lab 1 and Lab 2 so the lab session got a bit hectic. In future I will not run Key Skills sessions in the lab slot, and focus solely on the semester Excel and Matlab material. Ciaran did this with his half of the group and got through the material much better.
The students sat a lab based CA in Matlab on the 5th May, their last lab. Most of this CA is based on Lab 2 and the students have to create .m files that make a plot. All of the .m files are uploaded to an Assignment area in Moodle, together with a word document (here is the Template File to Paste to) containing the plots and .m file code. We gave out a sample CA the week before to encourage the students to go back over their three Labs in Matlab and to practice file uploading. On CA day most students had not practiced or looked at the labs or, indeed, could make much sense of the CA at all! We allowed them access to the lab material and any .m files they had already saved in lab sessions.
By the end of the lab most had realized that they were not doing anything difficult and had completed about half the CA. What slowed them down was that they did not know how to create .m files (they found a notes page that did the job and did not read the next page…), so were creating each plot from scratch in the command lines, and then having to copy and paste lines of code. The good students finished the CA in about 20mins. If I get a chance I’ll mark them tonight.
The remainder of the lectures covered Functions in Engineering which finished with solving exponential, ln and trig equations plus converting exponential data of the form Aexp(kt) to linear data. The final topic covered was on using the Sine and Cosine Rules. As this is the first year this revised Cert module is running, we have also handed out a Sample Paper and Solutions. These create more happiness than Christmas presents!
The last classes this week were again poorly attended affairs, though we have managed to move the horrid 4 to 5 slot to 3-4 for the last two weeks. I seem to have a lot of copies of the exam and solutions left unfortunately, but hopefully they will be picked up next week in the revision class.
I’ll finish this blog in the next 2 or 3 weeks with an overview of how I think things went and wah t i would change for next year. I’ll also talk about how the group got on…
regards
Paul
May 7th, 2009
Hi
Forgot to talk about our labs in the last post. As a technical maths course we wanted to introduce using Matlab too. Ciaran O’Sullivan has put together some very nice notes on
and my students are currently working through Lab1 and Lab2. Most students seem to be getting through this fairly well and we hope to run a second assignment in the lab shortly.
There are lots of other Matlab notes out there are various levels. Another set which could suit this level of student is
At a slightly higher level (level 7, 8?) this looks pretty good, if a little dense
Part of our learning outcomes for the maths modules is to introduce programming structures and we are going to do it through Matlab. For this semester it is “if…then..else” and we will use that structure to introduce piecewise defined functions in Lab3.
If you know any other appropriate Matlab notes, or can contribute some yourself, please get in touch via a comment.
regards
Paul
April 24th, 2009
Hi
Three whole teaching weeks since the last blog! – plus 2 weeks in the middle for Easter of course. Must admit, had no inclination to do anything apart from a pile of threatening CA scripts over the Easter break.
When I left you Assignments in stats were due on 24th Mar. Most students handed something in and the vast majority of them were original too! One copied excel file wasn’t bad and the offending student thinks doing it again is reasonable…Funnily enough, I gave each student involved half the marks of the original piece. The student who had done the work was mortified to lose half marks, and insisted the other student did the work again. The student who did the work will get marks back when the other hands something in. Seems to be an effective marking strategy!
Here is the marking template we used. I wrote it in a rush and it’s not great. The original assignment is perhaps not worded carefully enough. In the marking template I awarded marks for very simple things like renaming excel sheets as I thought this would be a few easy marks for the student. This is not explicitely stated in the assignment though, so many students simply didn’t do it.
There were some interesting data sets – lots from the Premier league for goal-scorers, yellow cards, appearances etc. Lots on populations and land areas and lots on cars. Perhaps the most interesting data set I got was for Felipe Contepomi’s points scoring record in all the matches he has played for Leinster.
On with the course so far. We finished off the notes on Further Algebra and Functions before Easter. This covered graphing quadratics and completing the square, which leads into graphing general curves which are shifted versions of some original one. The notes also cover domain and range of a function, function inverse and a discussion of exp and ln. By the way, a nice way to talk about the graph of the inverse is to plot exp, say, on a sheet of acetate – now reverse the acetate and rotate till you have the x and y axes transposed, giving the graph of ln (you all know that one I’m sure!).
In the week before Easter and after the break we have moved onto our next section, Functions occurring in Engineering. These notes include problem sheets with solutions and some old exam questions with solutions. The notes go into the usual suspects of exp(kx), Acos(wx+p), Asin(wx+p), ln(x) and variants. We spend time plotting graphs and getting students to quickly recognise or sketch Acos(wx) and Asin(wx) in particular. The second half of the notes focus on solving equations involving these functions and finish with converting data following an exponential law into linear data and a linear law.
The class has shrunk fairly alarmingly over the Easter break as the sun has come out to play. A test or two is probably in order to focus their minds a bit.
See you
Paul
April 24th, 2009
Hi
Havn’t been back for nearly two weeks – exams are due. The beauty of the semester system is that there is only a small window where they are not due, or being marked, of course…
My two hour class on Wed 12th Mar was cancelled due to the students going off on industrial visits. On Thursday 13th we finished the notes on vectors by looking at some 3D problems on distance and angle. See the previous post for notes.
Tuesday 18th March was Paddies Day where my daughter insisted I go on a ride in Merrion Square. This was a two seater carriage on a swinging arm – the carriage going round in a big circle while the arm also had the scope to violantly swing you up and down. I had to smile as our weight difference caused our carriage to swing up and down much more than the others, as far as I could see. Smile or hang on grimly trying not to die, can’t quite remember which.
Wednesday 19th was again our two hour afternoon session from 3 to 5pm. The day before being Paddies Day, the class was about two thirds empty. Talking to school teachers and other lecturers, it seems that an enormous proportion of 16 to 20 year olds missed classes on the Wednesday.
With my class so small I only did about 80mins with them as I was afraid of getting to far ahead for the bulk of the class. I handed out a new set of notes on further algebra and introduction to functions. We started by looking at the graph of x^2 and then graphing the result of adding a constant and/or shifting x by a constant. plenty for the students to do and this took us into completing the square and writing down the equation of a quadratic from it’s graph. Seemed to go well. I got them to shift more general curves based on the same principle. There are a set of problems at the end of the notes. Here is also another short problem sheet for the first half of these notes. We also had time to look at solving simultaneous equations in two variables – a bit of a mix this set of notes!
From the class I found out that whatever they had from 1pm to 3pm has now finished, so this first year group has now no class between 12 and 3!!!!! The priority is to fix this before next week…
The thursday evening class was pretty well attended. I had to quickly re-cover quadratics and linear simultaneous equations – the class then bacame a tutorial looking at the problems.
Which brings us to this mornings lab, 24th March. The summary statistics assignment is due this evening and the lab was full of course.. .Clearly, this was the first time most of them had looked at the assignment and many were determined not to read it during the lab time too. Over and over again I see that students don’t really have a problem with maths – that is just a symptom of not having any coherent method of learning anything.
- The weaker students did not have copies of the short lab exercises that showed them exactly what to do.
- If they could dig out the labs, they did not think to read them. They did not think to re-read them. They did not think to really re-re-read them.
- Even after finding the labs and being told to read a certain page, you could see their reluctance to do so. “Is there no silver bullet…?” you can feel them thinking.
Of course, the learning methods of good students has been well documented since Tinto. How to get students to do these things??
On the plus side several students had done the assignment, and because I was so busy they got roped in to helping the other students and were even moving round the room! A good result all round really. Good learners doing things that help them learn even more of course.
Tomorrow we start on functions and their graphs. We hope to introduce functions in Matlab and through Excel VBA in the lab. The notes will finish with inverse functions and investigate exp and ln.
see you next week
Paul
March 24th, 2009
Hi
Thursday evening was a class and the Tuesday a statistics lab.
Not much to report from the Thursday evening – only half a class again. I did hand out this vectors worksheet for the students. This contains mostly 2D problems on magnitude, dot product, angle between and resolution. Includes several diagrams and has solutions. I meant to put this into the Problem Sheet section within our CoP area of the NDLR but forgot to change some re-used metadata. Can I change the metadata? – no, I cannot. If ANYONE can possibly tell me how this might be done I’d be grateful.
We should finish the vector notes pretty soon. That will just leave a bit on 2D matrix transformation before we move onto completing the square and some graph drawing. The vector notes drag a bit and there isn’t enough time to play with 3D vectors much, which is where you can really see the advantage of dot product for doing geometry.
This mornings statistics lab was well attended & most students seem to have got stuck into it. This was our third lab
The link is to a zipped archive which also contains a data file. Part of the lab is to import this data file, which contains about 6500 wind speed records from around Ireland from 12 stations. This has some nice asymmetric datasets where the mean and median can be quite different (so you can ask where your turbines should be placed and why…). The Lab is in two sections
- Find the mean and standard deviation from a frequency table “manually” in Excel
- Import the wind speed data, sort it and extract some of it. Then use the Analysis Tool to plot a histogram and generate summary stats.
One hour wasn’t really long enough to do all of the lab.
I also handed out an assignment on basic stats to be completed by 5pm on 23rd March. The finished excel workbook is to be uploaded to the module moodle site. This is a great way to collect assignments as the file goes in under the student’s name and the moodle clock will take no excuses! The assignment is, of course, based on knowing how to do the 3 labs….
Next week we will run a Key Skills session in the lab and after that we will be looking at functions in Matlab and Excel VBA.
see you
Paul
March 10th, 2009
Previous Posts
Mathematics and Statistics Service Teaching