Mathematics and Statistics Service TeachingEnd of the Technical Mathematics 2 Course Story
June 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
Entry Filed under: Technical Mathematics 2 Story
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed