Mathematics and Statistics Service Teaching

Thursday 5th Mar 4pm and Tuesday 10th 12pm

March 10th, 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

Computer_Tasks Stats Lab 3

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

1. Find the mean and standard deviation from a frequency table “manually” in Excel
2. 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

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