Posts filed under 'Course Stories'
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
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
Hi
A difficult class to run as it is their last two hours of the day. I went straight through from 3 till 4.30 with no break. The lads at the back started getting restless at 4.15 anyway. The problem with negotiating an early finish is their very elastic view of time!
Still working through the 2D vectors notes. It is a shame that the stats labs are out of synch with the class notes. I would anticipate another 2 weeks of labs, whereas the notes finished last week. We will have to look at that next year. Back to vectors, we have covered graphical representation and parallelogram law plus i,j notation and yesterday, dot product. Here are a couple of decent vector visualisation sites:
Here is also a not terribly illuminating pulley problem, but the graphics are nice!
regards
Paul
March 5th, 2009
Hi
No joy moving this lab as I wanted to. Again, there was good attendance for the lab but I suspect that the classes tomorrow will be another story.
Most students wrapped up their work on Labs 1 and 2
Next week we will look at summary statistics and using the Excel Analysis Tool AddIn. This comes as standard with Excel (I think?). Go to Tools, AddIn’s and click on it to enable. After that, students will get an assignment to do for a week or so. Part of it will involve downloading data and i’ll put their data sources on a future post.
One problem with our labs is that the machines face in several different directions. This gets them chatting and playing games as you can’t see them! We have some software to monitor machines and turn stuff off (I’ll try and find out what it is called for next time) but you rarely get to look at a monitor for that long as you are busy round the room. Anyone else know how to deal with this problem without being too draconian?
Next class the dreaded Wednesday afternoon 2 hour session…
bye
Paul
March 3rd, 2009
In 2006 a new three year engineering programme started at Tallaght. This is an abinitio programme with a minimum Ordinary Leaving Cert B3 requirement. To complement this, we also took a look at the existing Mechanical Engineering Certificate program. The existence of a (slightly) harder abintio course (level 6.5?) gave us room to create a slightly easier (more applied, less theory) Cert – a level 5.5…
Here is the syllabus document. The module follows on from Technical Mathematics 1 (see this syllabus document or look at this complete Moodle course Semester 1 Engineering Maths Moodle Course at IT Tallaght, available in our NDLR MSHE Community of Practice notes Section), delivered last semester. This is the first year of delivery of this new cert program.
The module is to be delivered through three lectures/tutorials per week plus a one hour computer lab. This semester there are two groups – one taught by me and the other by Ciaran O’Sullivan. Each group nominally has 45 students, though that has dropped a bit since the January exams. The group is a mixture of electroMechanical and Mechanical students (13 and 32 resp.)
So far, we have covered very basic data representation and summary statistics. The notes are “gappy” with quite a lot for the students to fill in. They are perhaps to wordy at the moment. Some students also found a problem in that they missed earlier classes and then did not have data or filled in tables to use for their current work in class. We have also run 2 labs on data representation.
We have also run 2 keyskills sessions in the lab for each group. These are multichoice Moodle based quizzes covering last semesters work. It counts for 15% of their total module mark. The Key Skills in Mathematics moodle course is available within the NDLR, with instructions on how to re-use.
How have things gone so far?
Overall, attendence for my group is extremely poor. The lab is at 12 on a Tuesday, which is well attended, but their other classes are 3pm to 5pm Wednesday (their last 2 hours) and 4pm Thursday (their last hour) and attendence is poor to downright terrible! The 4pm class on wednesday in particular is a class too far for many of them. Attendence so far is 15 on less than 20%, 7 (20 to 40%), 12 (40 to 60%) and 11 (60 to 80%). This is fairly shocking, even accounting for some of the low attendence being from people who have probably left. It continuously amazes me how students think they can pass a module without coming to class.
Tomorrow I hope to move the lab to 4-5pm on wednesdays, leaving tuesday at 12 for a class. Two assessment elements will run in the lab (key skills and a stats assessment) so they will probably come to it!
We would be very interested in basic stats material. Do you have any good data sets or labs you have run too? Something with an engineering flavour would be great. If you have anything, I can put it in the NDLR for you and link to it from here.
Last week, we started 2D vectors in class. The students have found this easy I think. The better ones have got a bit bored and will disrupt the class if you don’t give them plenty to do.
That’s it as a run through of the module since Feb 2nd. We start week 5 tomorrow, and further posts will be short!
Just on the links – each link will be to the NDLR. You can find them directly in the CoP Notes section by searching for “Technical Mathematics 2″ in Advanced Search. When this blog has finished the whole lot, as well as any contributed material and links, will be zipped together. They will also be presented as a complete Moodle course for re-use.
See you tomorrow!
Paul
Paul
March 3rd, 2009
Hi
I’m going to tell the story of Technical Mathematics 2, which is our new Semester 2 course for Certificate in Mechanical Engineering students.
This will include the soft stuff like how the students are getting on, class management issues and so on, but more importantly it will link to course materials as they develop. These resources will be placed in the NDLR, and also be presented as a complete Moodle course at the end of the Semester.
The entire story should then describe the course through development and delivery. The story will appear on this mshe home page, and the complete story can be accessed through the Technical Mathematics 2 Story category.
If you would like to develop your own such story, please contact Eamon or myself.
If you would like to comment on this story as it develops please click on the comment link below this post.
cheers
Paul
February 27th, 2009
Mathematics and Statistics Service Teaching