Elephant Delta day 4 – Prof João Frederico da Costa Azevedo Meyer from Universidade Estadual de Campinas on Mathematical Disciplines for Undergraduate (and Graduate) Mathematics and Statistics: Challenges for Cooperating and Operating with Social Needs

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Prof João Frederico da Costa Azevedo Meyer from Universidade Estadual de Campinas

Different points of view lead to different views. Talking from the point of view of an applied mathematician – this will lead to a particular biased applied mathematician’s point of view, a utilitarian point of view, as well as an environmental scientist’s point of view.

He speaks as a customer. His students need certain skills, knowledge, etc. He is the one who needs the results of mathematical education at technical schools and university activities.

A lot of abstraction leads to unrealistic ideas: Who cares about the trigonometric functions applied to a 30 degree angle?

Fenando Pessoa: The preacher of his own truths…

Do students share our enthusiasm with what is taught in the classroom?

In fact, do WE share any enthusiasm?…

By | November 27th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Jeff Waldock from Sheffield Hallam University on Designing and using informal learning spaces to enhance student engagement with mathematical sciences

Jeff Waldock

Department of Engineering and Mathematics

Sheffield Hallem University, UK

Photo link here

Engagement: try to feel ‘belonging’, part of a community of staff and students. Aim: How to develop this more effectively.

Developing patterns of social behaviour.

Need IT-enabled space.

Community = having a common purpose. Space supports this aim. Communicate this idea frequently to students.

Design of Open Learning Space

(maybe in a corridor …)

  • Sense of belonging
  • Encourage staff-student, student-student interactions
  • Keep students engaged in gaps between classes.
  • Key words: active, collaborative, social
  • Activities: Peer-supported learning (PSL/PAL), group work, individual work, social/professional activities (e.g. strategy board games), informal staff-student contact (small amounts of interaction makes a big difference).
  • Activities enabled by: an attractive space people want to use, meeting rooms with white boards, tut rooms with white boards, IT enabled, card access to students after hours – trust needed (and security)
  • Room numbers in binary to make the space look mathematical.
By | November 27th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Shirley Wagner-Welsh from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University on An Investigation into the Effect of Mathematics Self-Efficacy and Mathematics Anxiety on Mathematics Performance

At Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University Very diverse socio-economic circumstances, mostly non-native English speakers. 23 Different languages on campus.

Why this study? There has been a large issue of poor performance and lack of engagement in mathematics.

What can we do about this?

Possible issues:

  • Topics are introduced at a fast pace
  • Students may not have the necessary prerequisites
  • Independent learning is required

Two other issues:

Mathematics self-efficacy:

Self-efficacy is people’s judgements of their capabilities to organise and execute courses of action required to attain designated types of performance (Bandura 1986).

Mathematics self-efficacy affects performance.

This can tell us why students sometimes don’t put in the necessary effort. If a student DOES have a high level of mathematical self-efficacy they tend to work longer on problems.

There does seem to be a link between mathematics self-efficacy and gender: Higher in males (grade 10-12 and pre-service teachers – Malpass, O’Neil and Hocenar: Self‐regulation, goal orientation, self‐efficacy, worry, and high‐stakes math achievement for mathematically gifted high school students) – in another study this was not found.…

By | November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Dr Jyoti Jhagroo from The Auckland University of Technology on Multicultural lecturing: some challenges

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Dr Jyoti Jhagroo from AUT.

This is a personal reflective narrative as a student and teacher in the school/higher education contexts.

It is a hermeneutic phenomenological study with 10 immigrant students

  • Considerations of cultural constructs: Languages, Beliefs and Experiences (though of course there are much more).
  • Students lived experiences in their mathematics classrooms with considerations for teacher education.
  • Explore some ideas of multiplications from different cultures and consider their implications for teaching and learning in a multicultural context. Take some ideas to take forward for teacher education

As a student with a personal narrative, Jyoti had been indoctrinated into the ideas of what mathematics education were about. It should be:

  • Culture-free
  • Factual
  • Based on theorems
  • Present, practice, perfect

As a teacher: a shift from a monocultural context to a multiculural context:

  • Some students spoke a different language at home, potentially held different beliefs and different experiences of mathematics
  • However, it seemed that the mathematics education practices and attitudes are often projected as culturally neutral ideologies.
By | November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|1 Comment

Elephant Delta talk list

By | November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Diana Quinn from The University of South Australia on Learning from experience: The realities of developing mathematics courses for an online engineering programme

Paper published in IJMEST http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0020739X.2015.1076895

Diana Quinn presented, co-authors Amie Albrecht, Brian Webby, Kevin White

University of South Australia

 Photo link available here

Cautious about moving courses online. Courses to be open access too.

Format of courses to be kept standard to make it easier to navigate.

Moodle tip: Can set only to accept pdf uploads.

Used Moodle tool ‘Dialogue’ one-on-one dialogue between student and staff.

Coordinators selected staff to attend professional development. They later coordinated online courses.

Workshops and tutorials for staff.

Well-lit, quiet rooms with good equipment where staff could create videos.

Virtual tours on Camtasia.

Courses ticked off for meeting regulations (according to rubric criteria) months before implementation.

Outcomes

Participant ages 14 – 74!

High pass and failure rates – bi-modal distribution.

Many no-shows who paid $1 000 fee to join!

Some engaged but did not submit assessments – just wanting to learn for themselves.

Kolb’s cycle

Action research

Over 10 cycles of development over 3 years they learnt much about how maths students learn.…

By | November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|1 Comment

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Dr Maritz Snyders from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University on Online video-based tutorials for a first-year mathematics service course

Simon Goldstone, Maritz Snyders presenting, co-author , Margariet Walton

Image taken from here

maritz.snyders@nmmu.ac.za

Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

Online tutorials can be done in students’ own time or in classes.

Disadvantages

If alone, no immediate support.

Limited scope of questions.

Can’t see how students lay out working.

Feedback not explanations, more like a repeat of the textbook.

Online Tutorial Project Design

300 – 400 students, various programmes.

Started after first semester test.

Marks from Moodle assessments counted to course assessment.

Students must write out full solutions and post online, mostly using phones or scanning. Only get marks for online questions if full solutions are uploaded. Spot checked to make sure uploads were valid. (Not just ‘Henry’s Solutions’ on every page!)

Camtasia software was used to record tutorial videos.

Camtasia Studio 7.0.1

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/eb/Camtasia_Studio_screenshot.png

Other software: Respondus (lets you write solutions in Microsoft Word format) but this has a site licence of US$3 000, no known open source alternative that is as good – institutional site licence), Microsoft Snipping Tool, Adobe, MS Word (Equation Editor better than Maths Type).…

By | November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Prof David Wagner from University of New Brunswick on Mathematics, Culture, and the Responsibility of Mathematics educators

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Prof David Wagner from The University of New Brunswick.

Previously in Swaziland

Mathematics educators: including all people who teach mathematics at any level.

What is mathematics?

Thought experiment: What is football? Translate these ideas into the question regarding mathematics:

  • Football is defined by the rules? But surely it’s much more than the rules.
  • You don’t know football unless you’ve been in a crowd of 10,000 with vuvuzelas!
  • You don’t know football unless you play football – rules, and the culture of fans is different from the practice of it. Many rules which are not in the rule book – informal rules.
  • There’s also a whole culture of marketing.
  • Organisations…and so much more.

You learn things when you watch the game about how to play it.

How does this relate to mathematics? Mathematics is much more than the usual definitions, has so many facets… What we do as teachers do affects how others see mathematics.…

By | November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|0 Comments

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Dr Alice Hui from The University of KwaZulu-Natal on Projective geometry as an undergraduate course: a tour of the three worlds of mathematics

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Dr Alice Hui from The University of KwaZulu-Natal.

Projective geometry as an undergraduate course: A tour of the three worlds of mathematics.

Attempt to persuade the audience to have projective geometry as an undegraduate course.

What is Projective Geometry?

Projective geometry describes objects as they appear, rather than as they are.

Two sides of a train track are parallel but look interest in the far end.

Taken from https://plus.maths.org/content/sites/plus.maths.org/files/features/projective/tracks1_small.jpg

  • Advantages of having projective geometry as an undergraduate course
    • An axiomatic approach to study geometry
      • A projective plane satisfies three axioms.
      • Can allow students to study geometry using an axiomatic approach.
      • Comparison to other axiomatic formulations that may be taught in undergraduate courses:
        • We use axioms to study natural numbers, real numbers, group, ring, field, vector space, set theory. They are not geometric.
        • Euclid’s Element is not rigorous in modern sense.
By | November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|4 Comments

Elephant Delta Day 3 – Professor Stephan Joubert from Tshwane University of Technology on Numerical solutions for the vibrating bar eigenvalue problem: a student exercise

Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics

Prof Stephan Joubert from Tshwane University of Technology.

Based on paper: On numerically solving an eigenvalue problem arising in a resonator gyroscope

Abstract of the problem:

In 1890 G.H. Bryan observed that when a vibrating structure is rotated with respect to inertial space, the vibrating pattern rotates at a rate proportional to the inertial rate of rotation. This effect, called “Bryan’s effect”, as well as the proportionality constant, called “Bryan’s factor”, have numerous navigational applications. Using a computer algebra system, we present a numerically accurate method for determining fundamental eigenvalues (and some of the overtone eigenvalues) as well as the corresponding eigenfunctions for a linear ordinary differential equation (ODE) boundary value problem (BVP) associated with a slowly rotating vibrating disc. The method provides easy and accurate calculation of Bryan’s factor, which is used to calibrate the resonator gyroscopes used for navigation in deep space missions, stratojets and submarines.

By | November 26th, 2015|Conference, Elephant Delta 2015, Uncategorized|1 Comment