Clemson/Shodor Building SMET Laptop Courses

1. Clemson/ShodorBuilding SMET Laptop Courses Steve Stevenson Steve@cs.clemson.edu Dan Warner Warner@math.clemson.edu

2. Introduction • Opening Remarks • Powerpointlessness • Simple, effective, web-accessible tools for teaching lower division • Developing modules/classes • Play time

3. Shodor Connection • This class is the outgrowth of fourteen years of teaching workshops to college faculty. • The subject is computational science and engineering. • Our mottois “Simple problems, well done.” • Shodor has a huge online repository.

4. Segue to Shodorhttp://www.shodor.org/talks/modelingSX

5. Interactivate Interactivate available from anywhere and we’ll make it available for CU laptops. Interactivate Categories

6. Segue to Dan

7. Segue to Steve

8. Our Approach to Development • Inquiry-based / problem-based learning. • Evidence-based reasoning • Performance-based assessment.

9. Inquiry/Problem – Based • Keep it simple, s-----. • Make it a seminal problem, historically interesting but still an attention grabber. • Pose problem with some rough edges so the students must first pose the question. • Hold off on software until problem posed.

10. Simple, Effective Exercises • Use Rabbits and Wolves to generate data • Experimental design • Observations • Plop and Histogram • Function Flyer as a qualitative exploration of quantitative model.

11. Simple, Effective Exercises • Birthday Exploration • Birthday month distribution from class. • Plop • Keep asking questions by changing data: E.g: What happens if we add data higher than mean?

12. Evidence-Based Reasoning • The answer is not done until the paperwork is done. It’s not enough to say the answer is 43. • Exploration! • Observation!

13. Performance Based Assessment • Students can work at a high level with partners. • But detail work must be done individually.

14. Hints • They’re smarter than we give them credit for, but they’re more unsophisticated in science than we realize. • Guided exploration but there will be a few bloody noses along the way.

15. Some Interactivate Tools • Function Flyer Function Flyer • Data Flyer Data Flyer • Histogram histogram • Plop Plop • Rabbits and WolvesRabbits and Wolves • Fire Fire!

16. Some CSERD Resources

17. CSERD • Many tutorials, our java applets and GUI tutorials.

18. Resources - Activities - Colors of Stars • The model is fairly simple for this, but it illustrates a key misconception about what is meant by "red hot", "white hot", etc.

19. Resources - Activities - Space Ship Pilot A game-like immersive environment in which the user can pilot one of two crafts, a space shuttle in a dock in space, or a boat on water. The idea is to look at Newton's laws with and without dispersive forces.

20. Resources - Activities - Pendulum Motion • Comparison of small angle approximation solution of simple pendulum to real solution. The results for a pendulum starting nearly vertical are very counterintuitive, and nothing like the small angle approximation.

21. Resources - Models - Newton-Rhapson calculator Solve coupled nonlinear equations using Newton-Rhapson method.

22. Resources - Models - Superposition of Waves • New model, being developed for Capital University. Untested, but if people are willing to look at something new and give feedback, that would be nice.

23. The End…of the Beginning