Mathematics and Statistics Service Teaching

Wednesday 25th March to Thursday 23rd April

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

Entry Filed under: Technical Mathematics 2 Story