Group 8

Jim Boyle
Namyong Lee
Benjamin Bratton
Bhavna Rawal
Abu Gafar Hossion
Michele McColgan
Marie Lopez del Puerto

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Discussion around learning objectives (group work monday morning):

  • Lower level:
    • Exposure to computation and also tools
    • Graphs tell a story
      • Fit data
      • Extract parameters from a fit
      • Understanding meaning of a parameter from a fit
      • Y = mx + b is the same as V = IR
  • How to ask a good question, using experiment to guide questions being asked
  • Upper level
    • Utilize tools
    • Build a model
    • convert a word problem to formula to coding to analysis of results 
  • Moving from handout+script to liveScript. Is it possible to have everything online? In physics it can be helpful to quick plot/draw something, does LiveCode have a drawing pad?
    • YES: drawFreehand allows freehand input as a drawing with a mouse (name/value pairs for lines, shading, etc) when you close figure the output is saved in the LiveCode
  • How to help under prepared students that are behind not fall further behind?
  • Submitting homeworks:
    • Do they submit better on paper when due the same time every week, or when Canvas/LMS sends reminder emails? Mixed responses.
  • Add "student executive function tasks" to course learning objectives to be ready for the business/corporate environment
    • In upper level courses, a "professionalism" grade that includes submitting assignments on time, communicating absences, etc
    • Computing science / professionalism learning objectives: Descriptive variable names, code comments that make code readable to other humans, Style guide is followed, Dates and authors and titles in comments
  • Only try to do one thing at a time, don't correct grammar if physics equations are actually the goal

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discussion of assessing learning objectives (group work session Monday Afternoon)

  • Some forms of P/F/W or S/U assessment for entire courses removes the scores and does mastery based assessment
  • For example: 18 modules or goals for the semester, Satisfactory/Need Improvement/Unsatisfactory with an NI repeat the assessment for a module if they wish to
  • Discussion with students around "what is mastery" and agreed somewhere around 85% is mastery but 60% is failing
    • Test, retake, retake 2 available. but each test was different and they had to show learning
  • Tell the students in advance of the test will be about, so they know what is important
  • Graduate students graded on satisfactory or unsatisfactory
  • First time grading mastery style, very time consuming, but pays off for the second time teaching
  • Electronics course: "this is the first test, you can retake it if you want to." Student: "Do i have to?" Instructor: "no, but you can't get a lower score"
  • General idea of Ungrading - 
  • https://lile.duke.edu/blog/2022/09/what-is-ungrading/
  • https://ctl.columbia.edu/faculty/sapp/ungrading/ 
  • https://www.amazon.com/Ungrading-Students-Undermines-Learning-Education/dp/1949199827

 

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Discussion and group sharing (tuesday morning)

  • Abu Gafar Hossion: chemistry discipline, but new into scripting/coding and thinking about ways to help under prepared students
    • maybe some MATLAB livescripts could be useful and a mix of excel and MATLAB
    • ultimate goal is for the students to understand and have confidence in the templates
    • sometimes it is very hard for students to understand the excel equations and how to translate that into "math" and understanding
    • it is challenging for students to take a blank template and actually use it
    • made some progress, but lots of work still to come
  • Bhavna Rawal: Working on team teaching with interdisciplinary focus, upcoming trip to antartica 
    • Real data is not clean, complex and needs to be dealt with
    • Data was collected on last cruise, marine salinity, temperature, phytoplankton, location, water sampling CTD
    • There are also ice cores, but mainly focused on these
    • Learn how to write directions for the students to be able to use the code
    • Trying to look at correlations between data column, how does nutrients correlate to phytoplankton bloom
    • Compare to realistic data, but current data is confusing or not importing correctly
    • ?? Is it more a classification problem of trying to explain population by other variables??
      • some varieties in color of plankton
    • more details to come as we go
      • no students go, health physical of very extensive
  • Marie Lopez del Puerto : Quantum Dots modern physics => how to make it modern times
    • In the past, script and handout with the question
    • converting to livescripts so that the handout and script are all in one
    • unfortunately, can't quite get all the input types to use easily, so some paper to be used
    • include checkpoints where there is very clear "pause points" they should check in with the lab instructor before continuing on
    • this is a spring course, so planning to use January to convert the rest of the labs and this time was to use one lab to test the livescript strategy
    • students are so used to split screens and flipping back and forth, much more so than instructor generation of using paper and screen or two screens
    • do they work in a group? => pairs, one computer but swap off who is typing about every 5 minutes
  • Namyong Lee - practicing live scripts
    • Especially in chaotic systems and sensitivity to conditions
    • see a potential in using LiveScripts, and being pushed by admins to move to open resources instead lab activities
    • potential in a textbook style total resources
    • initial parameters with a very tiny change for a pendulum angle
    • look at butterfly effect types of examples
    • on the grading side, modern textbooks with electronic grading resources are more and more common, admins are asking for people to go to open resources.
    • big struggle for pen/paper because the students don't use pen and paper frequently
    • everyone is using matlab online, and we have a site license
    • rethinking higher education in Minnesota, how to make sure all students have open education resources and the same access to resources, we can't change family income, but we can provide a site license and open textbooks
    • some free online home systems: many were made free during COVID but now they paid again
    • Some low cost platforms are in the $25-50 per student cost for homework systems, or "free" if the server is administrated by the institution themselves, or individual faculty to do the sys admin tasks
  • Jim Boyle - came with goal of developing a course
    • meteorology major => converting to atmospheric and climate science major
    • worked on some learning objectives for the course
    • Handling the time variable, is always complicated, but there's a matlab specific onramp for it
    • how to clean data? Using logical indexing in matlab
    • our institution only updates site licenses infrequently
    • filter out data that is missing, the old way is step by step, but the new method is plug and play, black box that doesn't explain as much how it happens
    • new class will be a junior level class where all the students have had a 100 level cs course in python
    • if you want to work for national weather service, you have to do an upper level programming course such as matlab, python, c++. Requirement for employment and weather forecasting
    • consider using dataframes in pandas/matlab
    • matlab clones are also available (Gnu Octav)
    • probably good for students to see mutliple computing languages and figure out what is computation vs what is matlab
  • Michele McColgan -

    • 3D visualization of magnetic fields and visualize 3D vectors
    • satelite data? citizen science of magnetic fields from individual cell phones?
    • map over time?
     

Summaries:

  • Learning objectives at mutliple scales (single activity, single project, single course)
  • Cleaning data, realistic data, challenges of data that comes from others or simulations
  • Working with live scripts, new features that are working great and also still some things that are missing
  • which language, open textbooks, what do our students/institutions need

     

 


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