Green Lake 2011: Glen Richgels – Use a TI Ranger to Help Students with Slope
Day 3 of Green Lake is a completely perfect day. The Lake is beautiful.
Glen teaches at BSU in Bemidji, Minnesota. I just noticed his shirt. It says WE ARE # .9! (with a bar above the nine). If you Google Glen’s name his site will be the first one that comes up. Glen had us look at some distance versus time graphs and had us try to walk them while the CBR kept track of our movements. The before and after shots look like this:
As I look at these I’m thinking about linking the discussion to transformations for the times when someone walks the graph in the correct shape but they started too close or too far away.
In Stage 2, I was facing away from the graph so I couldn’t see it and my 2 teammates described what I had to do. We started the graph and they walked me through it.
Here students start to use the language of slope. “Walk backward toward the ranger about 2 meters in 1 and a half seconds.” The beauty here is that the math serves the conversation. It is compelling and necessary to start using mathematical language. As a side note Glen mentioned that for the students he teaches (in a higher education setting) it makes the most sense to use Excel. He sees the kids getting more algebra benefit (than from, say, a graphing calculator) because they are labeling the columns in Excel and also seeing that a given input produces an output.
That was about it for the “slope” portion of the session and we spent some time talking about some recent research by University of Minnesota about NSF vs. traditional students that tracked them through high school and college. I’ll try to find this and link it up here. We also talked about the fact that Calculus should not be the holy grail anymore, but rather statistics. Glen mentioned that 80% of college students will need to take at least 1 to 3 stats classes in college for almost all professions. He also related a story about talking to the Engineer of the year in MN who hasn’t done any calculus since her sophomore year in college but does statistics every day.
If you send Glen an email he will send you an Intro to Mathematical Sciences Class Notebook which he and Dr. Derek Webb worked on. Ask about the islands activity also.
See also the Discrimination or Not? activity from the Navigations in statistics series.
