Natural Blogarithms

In my Fall course of Math Models, I have three groups working on projects to finish up the semester.  One of the groups have an assignment to explore a model of the spread of a forest fire.  The assumptions are that the trees are on a rectangular grid, or a lattice.  The time is a [...]

In my math models course this term, my students have begun working on their projects.  They will complete 3 – 4 modeling projects throughout the semester.  We just completed work on a Highway Design Problem with some basic curve fitting techniques to join two or three different grades (slopes) of road sections using parabolic [...]

I have the most excellent privilege of teaching a course at Wayland in Mathematical Modeling.  The course is designed as a projects course where the majority of the semester is spent working on modeling projects.  The typical problem will take groups of 3 – 4 students anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks to solve.  They [...]

Somehow, I thought developing an online math course would be easier.  Having taught college level math courses for 9 years now, I’ve begun to understand what it takes and doesn’t take for student to succeed in a college level mathematics course.[...]

In responding to a comment on the last entry, I answered the questions of what equipment and software I am using to create our online course materials:

For our College Algebra course, we cover the last six chapters from an Intermediate Algebra textbook. There will be a lecture for each section of each of the chapters. [...]

I am currently developing an online course in College Algebra for Wayland. The hope is to have a series of video lectures, accompanied by a lecture notebook where the students will fill in the book as they watch the lectures. Below is a sample video from on the series. [...]

A Guide to Grading Exams [...]

In my Faith and Science course, when we covered the scientific models for origins of the universe, we studied the “mainstream” model of the Big Bang. I remember making the comment that for many Christians who are scientists, the idea of a Big Bang at the beginning of the universe is completely consistent with the idea of God as Creator. “God spoke and BANG, it was”.[..]

Dr. Boyd was in charge for another day. This time he covered topics from the history of science as an illustration of how science progresses. Using specific case studies from the history of scientific endeavor, we learn some important principles that undergird how we understand science as it is today.[...]

We finished the concept of directional derivatives, introducing the notation for the gradient of a function of several variables. We proved the formula of the maximum value of the directional derivative, as well as the direction for which it is maximized.