Report on Faculty Exchange and Sabbatical during the 2006-07 Academic Year

1. Report on Faculty Exchange and Sabbatical during the2006-07 Academic Year Gerald Kruse, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics kruse@juniata.edu http://faculty.juniata.edu/kruse

2. 2006-07 • Faculty Exchange at Fachhochschule (FH) Muenster, in Burgsteinfurt, Germany, during the fall 2006 semester. • Burgsteinfurt is 30 miles outside Muenster, and it is the location of the FH-Muenster Engineering and Technology campus. • Algorithmen und Data Strukturen • Graphical Programming • Sabbatical in Huntingdon, PA, during the spring 2007 semester

3. We hope to encourage Juniata students to study at FH-Muenster by having a faculty exchange first Faculty Gerald Kruse Thomas Weik Juniata StudentsFH-Muenster Students Tim Auman Robin Segglemann Mike Link Frank Volkmer Sascha Hlusiak Morin Ostkamp

4. Departing Huntingdon on the Train

5. “Our” House in the Village of Leer

6. Riding Bikes into the Village of Leer

7. First Day of “Grundschule”

8. Foxhunt!

9. St. Nicholas

10. Outside “my” office

11. Juniata Students For Dinner

12. The Computer Lab

13. What is Quantitative Literacy? • “The ability to use numbers and data analysis in everyday life.” Bernard Madison, Univ. of Arkansas • “..knowing how to reason and think, and it is all but absent from our curricula today.” Gina Kolata, NY Times • “Having comfort with arithmetic, data analysis, computing, modeling, statistics, chance/probability, and reasoning.” Excerpt from Mathematics in Democracy. While a course in quantitative literacy might focus on practical, real-world problems, it still provides the students with a strong mathematical foundation.

14. Quantitative Literacy at Juniata College • Juniata has had “Quant-Math” and “Quant-Stat” skill requirement for graduation since the mid-1990’s. • MA 103, Quantitative Methods, was developed by Sue Esch to serve students who do not have courses with quantitative components in their POE’s. • MA 103 is one of the few courses which satisfies both the “QM” and “QS” skills. • A large percentage of students at Juniata satisfy their “Q” graduation requirement by taking MA 103, Quantitative Methods (5 sections per year).

15. Time for a change… • From 1996 to 2007, the text used in MA 103 was Quantitative Methods, notes written and maintained by Sue Esch (Bukowski and Kruse added as co-authors later), and produced on campus. • Students used two full-feature software packages: Minitab for statistics, and Maple for mathematics. • MA 103 was one of my favorite courses to teach, but I realized that after 10 years it was due for an update.

16. The Search Begins… • Published texts preferred • Excel-based technology preferred • Many texts considered, three seriously • Frequent consultation with Math department colleagues • Chosen Text: Quantitative Reasoning, by Sevilla and Somers (from Moravian).

17. Highlights • Pre- and post-assessments of student skills and attitudes • Active learning approach • Technology informs and enhances the math • Open-ended projects • Paper-reduced (assignments posted online, deliverables uploaded) • Provided my Math department colleagues with: daily schedule daily notes suggested homework problems solutions to all Activities

18. Additional Accomplishments • MAA PREP Workshop on Quantitative Literacy • FH-Muenster Kolloquium: “Google’s Billion Dollar Eigenvector” • SIGCSE Poster: “A Useful Case-Study in Algorithm Experimentation: Unexpected Timing Results with Heapsort” • SIGCSE Special Session: “A Status Report from the Committee to Evaluate Models of Faculty Scholarship” • MAA (Allegheny Mountain Section) Talk: “Are Quicksort and Heapsort Really O(n*lg n)?”