Plan. There’s an exam next Tuesday, so today should be review/solidification – if the students come with questions. They probably won’t. In the time for new work that’s sure to be there I think I will show them how to compute their GPA; maybe begin to deal with how well you have to do to improve your GPA.
Some general lessons I will tell them I hope they’ve learned:
- In most of the exercises, the answer depends on the numbers in the article – not on an internet search. So yes, use Google, but only when that’s appropriate.
- Citing the internet is more than “Google found this for me.” Google only found web sites with the information you want. Cite those urls, and write about why you trust them.
- Report numbers with their units, and with just the right number of significant digits. Most of the time most of the digits in the answer from your calculator make no sense at all.
- When you do want a calculator rather than a quick estimate, find one you can type your expression into (like the Google search bar). Mousing around over a screen image of a calculator is tedious, time wasting and error prone.
(I need to put these into the instructor’s manual, or the text itself.)
What happened:
Computing a hypothetical GPA went well enough. Several students found on line GPA calculators. That led to two problems. First, the weights for +/- grades were fixed, and didn’t match those at UMB (where B+ is 3.30, not 3.33). Second, and more important, the on line calculator hid the algorithm, so students didn’t learn it. I think the class discussion worked out both of those problems. With an exam coming on Tuesday I didn’t push ahead to how to improve your GPA. That’s for Thursday.
I did work the five nines exercise from the homework. One of the better students remarked that the units in the table obscured the meaning – that common units would make the factor of ten change from row to row clearer. Yes, but the numbers would make less intuitive sense.
One important problem I don’t know how to solve. A student said that he could do the exercises that were about things he cared about, even if he had to struggle with the vocabulary. So I have to try to teach the students to care about the exercises, not just to solve them.
For those who might care about five nines, I recommended this posting from Joel on Software.
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