Notes to Faculty

The versions posted here are in the style that we (my TAs and I) use for students in Computational Geology. Each module consists of 15-20 PowerPoint slides. Several of the slides contain an embedded Excel worksheet. The light yellow cells in the worksheets contain data (typed in numbers). The bright yellow cells in the worksheets contain formulas (and appear as numbers). The students are supposed to figure out the formulas in the cells.

As we use them, these modules are essentially self-paced, take-home lab assignments. The students are supposed to work through the modules, slide by slide, building their own worksheets as they go along, taking note of instructions (yellow boxes) and prompts, hints, and queries (green boxes). In some cases, worksheet cells on one slide are filled in with numbers on the next slide; these "answers" aim to give feedback to the students as they develop their worksheets. The target of the procedure is one or more worksheets, with formulas at the ready to receive new data to produce new answers. The easiest way to test student work on these modules is to ask the students to hand in a copy of their worksheets starting with a different set of input data.

Organization of the Modules

Each module starts with an introductory slide that identifies the geological subject and notes the QL skills the students will use. The next one or two slides preview the module and, in some cases, give background information. The last slide is "End of Module Assignments," which the students can hand in.

The modules roughly parallel mathematical material that I review in class. The class meets twice per week. The students, TAs and I meet in a room usually used for lecture. Each session is a "How to Solve It" session, in which the students divide up into groups and think through a geology problem with mathematical content. We discuss the math more than the geology. At the end of the class, we post a module that relates to the in-class discussion, and we assign at least some of the end-of-module questions.

Students report that the modules take 1-3 hours to complete, depending on how close the parallelism is between the class material and the homework assignment. Typically, we go through one or two modules per week.

Possible Applications

I have made these modules to be flexible. I hope they will be used by others. Colleagues at other universities have used one or more of them in a wide variety of ways - one set as semester-long class project (including collecting field data) in a history of mathematics class; one set as take-home assignments for a semester-long theme on Galileo in a Learning Community; one as a recombination of pieces of a couple of modules in an introductory oceanography class held in a computer lab.

With PowerPoint and Excel, you can easily break these modules apart and recombine them into something different than the presentations here. You can add new slides, new worksheets, new information, new assignments. Please feel free to use these modules and modify them. Please let me know how it works out.

Instructor Versions

I have "Instructor versions" for the "student versions" of the modules posted here. The instructor versions are the same as the student versions except that the Excel worksheets are posted as worksheets rather than as pictures. Thus in the instructor versions, you can double click on the worksheet and it comes up live, with the formulas ready to go (and users can see them). For access to the instructor versions, please complete a request form.