Tag: Teaching

How to Take a Calculus Test

Show what you know.
Don’t invent new math.
Don’t contradict yourself.
Do the easy questions first.
If you don’t know how to do a problem, start by writing down relevant things that you know are true in general.
Break difficult problems into manageable pieces.
Know what a function is, and know what things are functions.
If you aren’t taking a derivative, it’s probably wrong. (see the explanation below)
If you’re doing obscene amounts of computation, it’s probably wrong.
Don’t care about the final answer.

(via Jeremy)

A Slow Study Group for ML

Hi,
I’m going to work through
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/BTML/
and
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lp15/MLbook/
using
http://www.smlnj.org/
SLOWLY over MANY MONTHS.
The reason is that I’ve never learned a statically typed functional programming language, I feel weak on recursive data type definitions, and I am curious about compiler and interpreter construction. So, I’m looking for a way to learn about all 3 at once.
Why ML?

  1. Proven, excellent pedagogical language with great resources.
  2. Smaller than OCaml, F#, and Haskell; so I won’t get distracted with tons of “stuff”
  3. Puts me in a good position if I wanted to use it “for real” that OCaml, F#, Haskell, or even Scala and some other ML in Java languages would be a good follow up path in terms of leveraging the investment.

Basically when I sit down to learn the basics of anything from #2 I feel like they assume you know the basics of ML, and well, I don’t!
Let me know if you want to review problems together.

AcroTEX and eqExam for the Truly Impatient

eqExam is just a wonderful LaTeX package for writing things like exams and quizzes. It takes into account most of what you are about right out of the box like whether you are proctoring the exam online or in printed form and whether you want an answer key printed or not. Here is an example of something that I threw together quickly by hacking up one of the example tests.
There are even really advanced things like exporting the answer data for automatic electronic submission; it’s got me really curious how people are using this in the wild.
Setup is really easy, the only caveat is that you must use MiKTEX version 2.8. Version 2.9 seems not to run at this point.
If you have never set up MiKTEX or eqExam before then my directions are attached here. Please let me know how it worked for you if you try them out.
One big question for some of you is why you would use something like this rather than MS Word or Adobe Acrobat Pro and it is a good question. The only answer that I can share is why it is so valuable for me… it is because you get to use all of the power of LaTeX to generate PDF forms and exams. That might sound like not a big deal, but if it doesn’t then you should really dig deeper into LaTeX to see how it could help you to better communicate.

SchemaSpy: A Graphical Database Schema Metadata Browser

SchemaSpy is a Java-based tool that analyzes the metadata of a schema in a database and generates a visual representation of it in a browser-displayable format. It lets you click through the hierarchy of database tables via child and parent table relationships as represented by both HTML links and entity-relationship diagrams. It’s also designed to help resolve the obtuse errors that a database sometimes gives related to failures due to constraints.

This is an excellent tool in its own right; and if nothing else for its beautiful use of Graphviz.
See the example(s) here.

To again feel the creative voice

Through an historical discussion of the role and nature of creativity in the sciences and mathematics, a process to have students find their creative voice is described

(via stevem)
I couldn’t elegantly put to words just how delightful this paper is about the nature of creativity and learning. If you have ever had the experience of having a “nightmare” about something you are trying very hard to learn and then eventually “dreamed the solution”; then you will find this paper to be both fascinating and inspiring.

Matthias Felleisen and the PLT Team win the ACM Karl Karlstrom Award

Presented annually to an outstanding educator who is: appointed to a recognized educational baccalaureate institution; recognized for advancing new teaching methodologies, or effecting new curriculum development or expansion in Computer Science and Engineering; or making a significant contribution to the educational mission of the ACM. Those who have been teaching for ten years or less will be given special consideration. A prize of $5,000 is supplied by the Prentice-Hall Publishing Company.

Via Matthias via ACM via Shriram.