AlgebraHut.com Blog

I was watching Fox News Sunday on July 4th (this past Sunday).  Please do not attempt to guess my political leanings from this admission, but I do enjoy watching Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.  I was disappointed this Sunday because Chris Wallace wasn’t hosting the show but had a substitute.  He does this from time to time.

I was happy to see the substitute wasn’t stony-faced Brit Hume, but was Major Garrett.  He didn’t do a bad job.  But he did ask a ridiculous question, a question also asked by Congress, of Kenneth Feinberg, the man in charge of the BP Restitution Fund.  News anchors and political pundits are full of ridiculous questions, but this one is related to math and many people may have missed the ridiculousness of the question.

Here is the clip:

$130 million is a lot of money in and of itself. I’ll never see that much money. So it might seem like something worth inquiring about.

However, relative to $20 BILLION, $130 million barely registers. So why make a stink about whether that $130 million counts toward the $20 billion? It makes little difference either way. It was a waste of time for Congress and Major Garrett to ask such a question.

To give you an idea of how little it matters compared to the total amount, look at it as a percentage. $130 million is only about one half of one percent of the total $20 billion! 1/2% is small potatoes.

To bring it back down to Earth (as opposed to numbers in the billions), 1/2% of $1000 is only FIVE BUCKS.

1/2% of $100 is FIFTY CENTS!

1/2% of $10 is a NICKEL! Isn’t it silly for congress and Major Garrett to worry about a NICKEL when they are trying to manage a ten spot?

Think of it this way:

Let’s suppose that, today, BP pledged to give $10 for every tarball found on the shores of the Gulf Coast states to date. But BP had already donated a nickel for each tarball.

So who would be concerned with the answer to this question: Are they going to count that nickel they already paid toward their new $10 pledge for each tarball? Apparently, Congress and Major Garrett.

Incidentally, I also noticed that this Hulu video had a funny tag on it:

None of the other videos had these tags. Too funny.

Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin

I am still working on this game idea.  It is alot more work than I was expecting.  But it IS starting to come together.  I have a homepage put together and I am currently working on ironing out the signup page.

Just today, I realized that I will need to have some sort of verification system for the sign up, so that no body signs up as another student, just to cause problems.  I have no training in setting up databases or designing games or information security or any number of 100’s of things that must be considered when creating something like this.  I am certain that I am not following any best practices as I am just learning by the seat of my pants.  But it’s fun.

I have been working on integrating Facebook into my game.  Facebook has done a great job of making oauth as easy as possible for the novice like me.  But it’s still fuzzy for me.  I don’t quite grasp how http post and curl and json and all the really works, though I can sort of take what someone else has done and tweak it for my purposes.

I need to go back to school for computer science.  It’s what I should have done in the first place, at least dual major.  Then I would have something useful to go along with my degree in Astronomy.  Computer science is fun because it is interesting like math but you can actually make neat stuff with it and enjoy doing it for its own sake (again just like math).

Anyway, now I’m rambling on.  I just wanted to post an update.  Thanks for reading? (if there are any legitimate readers).

~Dylan Faullin

The spring semester ended about a month ago.  So what sorts of neat things have I accomplished?  Almost nothing!  I am totally wasting my time.  Not wasting, but there have been lots of family (in-law) interactions in the past month, most of them positive.  The house is almost back to normal and I am just now getting into the mood to be productive.

The only thing I’ve done any work on really has been redesigning my course(s) (this isn’t entirely true; I am teaching a class right now and have been tying up loose ends at work and finishing up a online course, but I still feel like I’ve been lazy). 

I have been wanting to redesign my classes to be more game-like and objectives-based.  In a nutshell, you do this task and you get this reward, plus you might unlock new tasks which will lead to new rewards, etc.

So far, I’ve created a proto-type of a badge to be used to award students for mastering a task or doing an activity successfully.

Square Root Badge

When a student masters simplifying square roots, they will be awarded this badge, along with 50-100points, and the ability to earn other badges.

This badge was created using the Open Office Draw program, which is FREE!  It’s no photoshop, but it does a decent job and did I mention it is FREE!?

I’ve also worked up a blueprint for how I’d like to implement this game-like mechanic into my classes.  My emphasis is on ease-of-use.  I don’t want this to take up too much time.  I will make it secure, so that students cannot cheat the system, but at the same time make it so that it will normally only take 2 clicks and possibly a password to award a badge. 

I am hoping to set it up so that I can share this system with other teachers interested in doing something similar.  I don’t plan on trying to integrate it into any particular LMS, because there are too many out there and they are fairly proprietary (meaning they might not like it if I try to add-on).  So this will have to be stand alone.

This may be too ambitious, but I would like to integrate this system with social media, like facebook and twitter, so that when a student earns a badge, it will be sent to their facebook or twitter stream.

On a related note, I need to get working on posting videos of my lecture examples online.  I have decided to script it first, which will mean that it is going to take some time, but it will be worth it and I will make the script available with the video, for the hearing impaired and those learners who prefer reading to watching a video.

I’ll let you know when I start churning those out.  Thanks for reading.

~Dylan Faullin

I was afraid that I hadn’t posted anything in a while, but it has only been 2.5 weeks, about par for the course for a blogger of 1.  The semester ended last week for me.  I was helping (?) with an event at school for the past couple of days, so today is my first official day out of work.

Summer classes are set to begin later this month.  I might be teaching a class then, starting May 25th (1 week from today!!!), but so far the class has only 2 students enrolled.  I may ask that they squash that.  I have had the privilege of teaching a couple of courses with 2-4 students, but it has yet to really work out well.  It is a lot of effort to teach, regardless of the number of students in class.  The grading is easier (because there is less to do).

However, the worst problem is that, often, the students do not take the class seriously enough when there are only 2-4 in there.  The extra money is nice though…

Anyhow, even if that class runs, it only meets Tuesday nights and all day Saturday, which leaves me with 5 days off.  I have big plans for this summer and I should have plenty of time to carry them out!

1.  I plan to make a screencast of nearly every example I do in my usual lecture (see my previous post).

2.  I would like to work on my online graphing calculator, JS-83.  I need to work on some higher-level functions, especially related to the graphing.  For example, I would like for the graphs to be able to determine x- and y-intercepts or area under the curve.

The Google Chrome extension of JS-83 is doing all right.  4 ratings, 5 stars each, with supposedly ~350 users and ~50 weekly downloads.  The numbers aren’t adding up for me, I suppose the number of users are how many people download and keep and interact with the extension, which is less than the actually number of downloads (which, at 50 per week, must have surpassed 1000 by now).

I also need to work on the help wiki, to make it more user friendly.  If I can do so, I think this calculator will be good enough that I may introduce it in my classes starting this summer/fall.

I have been given an extra bit of motivation today with the announcement of Google Chrome Web Store.  This will be like an app store, but for web apps specifically (rather than just mobile apps).  This means I could actually SELL JS-83 on the Chrome Web Store marketplace and potentially start bringing in money, which I could reinvest in upgrading to a production-level server and possibly advertising.  I would take down the web version (which I’m not really liking anyway) and potentially scale back the Chrome extension version (to make it a typical free version).

I will take the extension design, which uses HTML5 local storage and canvas and rounded corners, and build upon it (with the improvements mentioned above)  and this is what I plan to sell on the Chrome Web Store, for maybe .99 or 1.99. The only reason I’m hesitant about selling JS-83 is that, in doing so, there is an implied warranty or quality assurance, which I’m not ready to give yet.  Does it do every calculation correctly?  I’m not sure.  But I’d better be sure before people pay money for it and use its answers on their exams!  As long as it’s free, you get what you pay for.  :)  So no worries.

3)  As exciting as that is, I am even MORE excited about my planned course redesign.  Lately, I have been inspired by some videos I’ve caught on TED, concerning psychology and behavior modification.  If I could go back to school, I would perhaps have taken more classes on computer programming (java and .NET) and behavioral psych, because that is where the money and innovation is now! So how am I redesigning my course?  I am going to change my courses into a GAME!  I was especially inspired by this video:

To change my courses into a game, I plan to award points and badges for every possible positive behavior in the class and for mastering concepts. The student’s grade in the course will be heavily based on how they do with the points and badges.

To further encourage good behavior, a student’s numbers/stats for the game will be shown in comparison with the average of the class as a whole. So if the student has earned 5 badges, but the class average is 9 badges, the student will know he/she is behind and will need to catch up.

I’m in the planning stages right now. I will be sure to post often as things get fleshed out and I may even try to recruit a few people to test things out once they are up and running. I hope to be ready to go by the end of the summer for fall classes (at least for one fall class).

Also, I plan to build the code in such a way that I could share the setup with other teachers, even non-math teachers. I don’t have much experience in best coding practices for this purpose, but I will do MY best to make this as sharable as possible.

4) I do have another project that I started a couple months back, but haven’t had time to wrap up: http://www.mymathexample.com . This website is supposed to be for creating, sharing, and searching math examples. Some things I’d like to do: allow for youtube embeds on the math examples; allow people to register and save their favorite math examples to a favs list, make study guides with math examples that they either find or create themselves, and I don’t know, there were some other things I wanted to do.

Funny thing is: I’ve already been hit by a spammer! Someone is creating math example pages, but only putting in links for viagra! I was thinking of having my students create math examples online and present them in class. I’ve made creating the math examples about as simple as one possibly can!

Well, that about sums up my projects for the summer. It’s enough to keep me busy and in front of a computer most of the time! (Not necessarily a good thing). Thanks for reading. ~Dylan Faullin

I am pretty excited with my latest idea. As you may already know, I have an Interwrite Board in my classroom (1 full school year now). The Interwrite Board works with software on a computer to essentially allow you to write with a special pen to the computer.

The light bulb came on a little late for me, but if it writes it to the computer screen, then you can use it in a screencast. I tested out this idea for the 2nd time and it worked better than expected. I am really pleased with the simplicity and quality of it.

I used Screenr, which is free and requires NO download. Super convenient. Plus my computer in the classroom is frozen/locked down and it takes an executive command and a little luck for it be unfrozen to install new software.Screenr is a web app for recording a screen cast. It is tied closely with twitter, to the point in fact that you have to log in with Twitter to use Screenr and it prompts you to tweet a message when you complete a screencast.

I used a borrowed set of headphones with an extension cord so I could reach the Interwrite Board. I am considering getting a wireless headset, but I’m not sure of the sound quality.

If you don’t have money to spend on an Interwrite Board, you could opt for the Interwrite Pad, which I believe is in the neighborhood of $300. It takes some practice to get used to writing on the pad, but the functionality is all the same.

Anyway, here is the result. Let me know what you think.

Some more info on Screenr. There is a 5 minute limit. There are some math examples where I’m sure I could use more time. I haven’t tried Jing or screencast.com yet. There is a slight delay with using Screenr in the mouse movement. It isn’t much, but it is noticeable when you are quickly writing.

Also, with Screenr, you can directly upload your screencast to youtube, which I think is a really nice option.

Thanks for reading. Let me know what you think.

~Dylan Faullin