Course Activity 0.1: Footprints
Objectives: To introduce the students to the teaching approach in class, each other and the process of modeling.
Preliminaries/Lead-In: Syllabus discussion - it is probably a good idea to emphasize that this is an active classroom, the students will be expected to work every day and much of class time will be spent working in small groups. We'll usually come together as a whole class for discussion a number of times each class period.
Suggested Procedures: After (or before if you prefer) discussing the syllabus, hand out the activity and give very little guidance, allow them to read the set-up, tell them to work in small groups (2-3) with those around them and to just try to come up with something. Walk around the room talking to individual groups and get a sense of what they are coming up with. When they seem to have come up with a process start to scatter around the footprint outlines, measuring tapes, graph paper etc. They now need to test their process on these footprints. Have some of the groups present what they came up with on the board or document camera, or do this yourself given what you have seen around the classroom. It's fun to have the students tell the predicted heights they came up with using their processes and then tell them the true heights of the individuals who made these footprints:
Height of People corresponding to Footprints:
Footprint A: (Large one not scanned in) 6’1’’
Footprint B: 5’8’’
Footprint C: 3’8’’
Good discussion can ensue about why their predictions (especially for Footprint C) were so far off - Footprint C was made by an 8 yr old. - not a member of the population they sampled from! We have to keep in mind the trend we're modeling for the purpose of predicting - is it appropriate for the particular prediction we want to make?
Wrap-Up/Take-Away: There is really nothing in this activity that the students must leave the classroom with other than a general impression of what this class will be like. However it is possible to highlight the modeling process that they have just gone through and note that we will be doing this time and time again in this class. We started with a question, we found a way to model that situation, we tested our model and adjusted it, we predicted using our model, and then we evaluated the level of accuracy of these predictions. At this point we could make any additional adjustments to our model if necessary.
Possible Homework: Course Activity 0.2 Part I - questions 1 a and b (some of us will have time to do this in class and some won't)
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