Logistics of Mathematical Modeling-Focused Projects

This article addresses the logistics of implementing projects in an undergraduate mathematics class and is intended both for new instructors and for instructors who have had negative experiences implementing projects in the past. Project implementation is given for both lower and upper division mathematics courses with an emphasis on mathematical modeling and data collection. Projects provide tangible connections to course content which can motivate students to learn at a deeper level. Logistical pitfalls and insights are highlighted as well as descriptions of several key implementation resources. Effective assessment tools, which allowed me to smoothly adjust to student feedback, are demonstrated for a sample class. As I smoothed the transition into each project and guided students through the use of the technology, their negative feedback on projects decreased and more students noted how the projects had enhanced their understanding of the course topics. Best practices learned over the years are given along with project summaries and sample topics. These projects were implemented at a small liberal arts university, but advice is given to extend them to larger classes for broader use.Comment: 27 pages, no figures, 1 tabl

Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Data Science

The Park City Math Institute (PCMI) 2016 Summer Undergraduate Faculty Program met for the purpose of composing guidelines for undergraduate programs in Data Science. The group consisted of 25 undergraduate faculty from a variety of institutions in the U.S., primarily from the disciplines of mathematics, statistics and computer science. These guidelines are meant to provide some structure for institutions planning for or revising a major in Data Science

Business Process Management Education in Academia: Status, challenges, and Recommendations

In response to the growing proliferation of Business Process Management (BPM) in industry and the demand this creates for BPM expertise, universities across the globe are at various stages of incorporating knowledge and skills in their teaching offerings. However, there are still only a handful of institutions that offer specialized education in BPM in a systematic and in-depth manner. This article is based on a global educators’ panel discussion held at the 2009 European Conference on Information Systems in Verona, Italy. The article presents the BPM programs of five universities from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, describing the BPM content covered, program and course structures, and challenges and lessons learned. The article also provides a comparative content analysis of BPM education programs illustrating a heterogeneous view of BPM. The examples presented demonstrate how different courses and programs can be developed to meet the educational goals of a university department, program, or school. This article contributes insights on how best to continuously sustain and reshape BPM education to ensure it remains dynamic, responsive, and sustainable in light of the evolving and ever-changing marketplace demands for BPM expertise

Should WCOB 3016 Business Strategy and Planning be Restructured?

Review of the WCOB 3016 Business Strategy and Planning course and what areas of the course should and/or shouldn\u27t be restructured, based on student surveys, faculty/professor interviews, and benchmarks

Teaching Substantive Environmental Law and Practice Skills Through Interest Group Role-Playing

Most law students take their first introductory course in environmental law during their second year of law school. The traditional first-year curriculum does little to prepare students for the complex statutory and regulatory models for most environmental regulation. Law students at the end of their first year often have had little exposure to statutory interpretation. Further, they often have no exposure to administrative law and regulatory implementation. These students may expect statutes to provide clear statements of rules rather than guidelines for administrative rulemaking. They also tend to view the lawmaking and interpretive process through the traditional lens of congressional legislation and common-law-style judicial interpretation in a bipolar scheme of implementation--where the regulatory agencies and the regulated industries are the only players. In fact, environmental regulatory programs constantly evolve through a complex interaction of legislative amendment, administrative rulemaking, and judicial interpretation. Influencing these programs are the multipolar interaction of regulated industries, environmental groups, state agencies, and federal regulators. Law students accustomed to the bipolar model of common-law legal development and who expect statutory law to consist of a simple reading of clear statutory texts can find this interest group pluralist model of law development bewildering. One way to help give context to this complex interaction is to place students in the roles of the various advocates and decision-makers in the environmental law processes. Assigning students to adopt the perspective of various distinct players in the regulatory process, such as agency lawyer, industry lawyer, and environmental NGO lawyer, helps make this complex interaction more accessible to students. This also provides an introduction into the skills of statutory interpretation and regulatory implementation. At Pace Law School, we have had considerable success integrating this approach into an Environmental Law Skills course. This course combines a comprehensive study of the Clean Water Act (CWA) regulatory program with skills-based exercises in administrative rulemaking, judicial review, regulatory permitting, negotiation, and enforcement. The course was added to the curriculum in the 1990s in response to the growing recognition by the legal academy that the traditional case-oriented method of instruction failed to result in law graduates with basic competencies expected of lawyers. The course has been refined over the years to incorporate the Carnegie Report\u27s more recent critiques: the legal education\u27s failure to foster students\u27 development of their professional identities and their understanding of lawyers\u27 role in representing clients. By integrating role-playing, problem solving, and doctrinal instruction, the course seeks to engage students in active learning and professional identity development. The course also seeks to implement recommendations for the improvement of legal instruction contained in Professor Stuckey\u27s influential 2007 report, Best Practices for Legal Education. In particular, the course seeks to “teach doctrine, theory, and practice as part of a unified, coordinated program of instruction” as recommended in that report

Path planning algorithm for a car like robot based on Coronoi Diagram Method

The purpose of this study is to develop an efficient offline path planning algorithm that is capable of finding optimal collision-free paths from a starting point to a goal point. The algorithm is based on Voronoi diagram method for the environment representation combined with Dijkstra’s algorithm to find the shortest path. Since Voronoi diagram path exhibits sharp corners and redundant turns, path tracking was applied considering the robot’s kinematic constraints. The results has shown that the Voronoi diagram path planning method recorded fast computational time as it provides simpler, faster and efficient path finding. The final path, after considering robot’s kinematic constraints, provides shorter path length and smoother compared to the original one. The final path can be tuned to the desired path by tuning the parameter setting; velocity, v and minimum turning radius, Rmin. In comparison with the Cell Decomposition method, it shows that Voronoi diagram has a faster computation time. This leads to the reduced cost in terms of time. The findings of this research have shown that Voronoi Diagram and Dijkstra’s Algorithm are a good combination in the path planning problem in terms of finding a safe and shortest path

A guide for Teachers

The role of the teacher in Higher Education is changing rapidly, and much of this change is as the result of the introduction of e-Learning. Teachers are now expected to share their role as course designers with many other professionals working in their institution while taking on a bigger role in the technical and resource discovery aspects of course design. This guide tackles these issues as well as examining emerging pedagogical issues that arise from the use of technologies in teaching. You will find information, advice and guidance that will help you make appropriate and effective use of e-Learning to support your students

Enhancing Undergraduate AI Courses through Machine Learning Projects

It is generally recognized that an undergraduate introductory Artificial Intelligence course is challenging to teach. This is, in part, due to the diverse and seemingly disconnected core topics that are typically covered. The paper presents work funded by the National Science Foundation to address this problem and to enhance the student learning experience in the course. Our work involves the development of an adaptable framework for the presentation of core AI topics through a unifying theme of machine learning. A suite of hands-on semester-long projects are developed, each involving the design and implementation of a learning system that enhances a commonly-deployed application. The projects use machine learning as a unifying theme to tie together the core AI topics. In this paper, we will first provide an overview of our model and the projects being developed and will then present in some detail our experiences with one of the projects – Web User Profiling which we have used in our AI class