Lab materials

Brief note on labs and reports

Labs are designed to help you learn via exploring, visualizing, discovering, and synthesizing your findings. You may work on lab activities in teams if you wish. Each lab requires turning in a detailed written discussion of your work (i.e., the lab report). Your lab report is expected to be a comprehensive, well-written, detailed synthesis of your work. Your grade for each week's lab will be based on the report that you turn in.

I am perfectly happy with hand-written reports -- you don't have to type them. Instead, what I am not satisfied with are skimpy, minimalist reports, that look like homework solutions, with little or no discussion of context, what you did, why, or how you arrived at your conclusion or solution. There is no recipe on how to write a perfect lab report, since the activities and explorations in labs vary widely. The main thing to keep in mind is that the report must give a complete picture of your activities and how/why this led to your conclusions and/or solution. In general, a complete report is expected to contain written discussion, graphs, equations and calculations, as needed.

Grading rubric 
The grading of lab reports will consider mathematical content, as well as clarity and completeness of your written discussion. It will be graded according to the following rubric
      10 -- excellent work; no complaints on content or on writing.
      8-9 -- mathematical content is correct but writeup is missing some detail;
            or writeup is good, but small error(s) in mathematical work.
      6-7 -- correct math, but sloppy writeup; or the other way round.
      0-5 -- multiple gaps in written report and/or serious errors in work.

Weekly lab description & instructions

*  Feb. 8:   Exploring exponentials.  
                    Trips to the moon.

                  Here is an example showing how to write a report for this lab.

*  Feb. 15:   Approximations to rates of change.  
                  Limits using numerical methods.

*  Feb. 22:   Limits and continuity practice problems.

*  March 8:   Modeling growth via derivatives.  
                    Trigonometry review.

*  Mar. 15:   Modeling population interactions in ecosystems.

*  Mar. 29:   A seriously silly model of romantic love!

*  Apr. 12:   (I) Textbook exercises; and (II) The coolest graph contest!

*  Apr. 19:   (I) Newton method; (II) Related rates exercises

*  Apr. 26:   Optimization applications.

*  May 3:   Integral calculus foundations.