This week (and last) in screencasting: Functions!

So we started  back to classes this past week, and getting ready has demanded much of my time and blogging capabilities. But I did get some new screencasts done. I finished the series of screencasts I was making for our calculus students to prepare for Mastery Exams, a series of short untimed quizzes over precalculus material that students have to pass with a 100% score. But then I turned around and did some more for my two sections of calculus on functions. There were three of them. The first one covers what a function is, and how we can work with them as formulas:

The second one continues with functions as graphs, tables, and verbal descriptions:

And this third one is all on domain and range:

The reason I made these was because we were doing the first section of the Stewart calculus book in one day of class. If you know this book, you realize this is impossible because there is an enormous amount of stuff crammed into this one section. Two items covered in that section are how to calculate and reduce the difference quotient $\frac{f(a+h) - f(a)}{h}$ and doing word problems. Each of these topics alone can cover multiple class meetings, since many students are historically rusty or just plain bad at manipulating formulas correctly and suffer instantaneous brain-lock when put into the presence of a word problem. So, my thought was to go all Eric Mazur on them and farm out the material that is most likely to be easy review for them as an outside “reading” assignment, and spend the time in class on the stuff that on which they were most likely to need serious help.

Our first class was last Tuesday and the second class wasn’t until Thursday, so I assigned the three videos and three related exercises from the Stewart book for Thursday, along with instructions to email questions on any of this, or post to our Moodle discussion board. I made up some clicker questions that we used to assess their grasp of the material in these videos, and guess what? Many students didn’t have any problems at all with this material, and those who did got their issues straightened out through discussions with other students as part of the clicker activity.

They’ll be assessed in 2 or 3 other ways on this stuff this week to make sure they really have the material down and are not just being shy about not having it. But it looks like using screencasts to motivate student contact with the material outside of class worked fine, at least as effectively as me lecturing over it. And we had more time for the hard stuff that I wouldn’t expect students to be able to handle, not all of them anyway.

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