Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

In the meeting of my general science requirement mechanics lab for the fourth week of the term, we had the third activity, which is Graphs and Equations.

As I mentioned before, this used to be a take home assignment because it doesn’t use any materials from the laboratory except for the ruler, which a lot of the students already have themselves.

But because of my experience from the previous term of students not consulting on how it is supposed to be answered, which leads me to conclude (correctly) that they did not work on it, I decided that it was better to oversee them making these in the lab instead of assuming that they are answering them outside of class hours.

I even gave hints on the board as to how they are supposed to get the new linear equation for the table of values given, using the fact that the value for when one of the points is zero and one or negative one is included.

At the halfway point of the period though still no one had given any of the correct answers for the parabolic and hyperbolic equations that they have already been shown in their proper format, besides having been discussed in their Analytical Geometry class – at least surely for the engineering students.

So I gave that to them as a bonus in the end, and instead told them the secret of the whole exercise, which is that the last method of linearization given, the method of least squares, is the easiest to use, because it already gives the equation in the form y = mx + b after computing for summations, summations of squares and summations of products.

It makes me rethink the whole activity for the next time I teach this subject. Maybe it should go straight to the point and not show them any difficult method anymore.

There is at least one major difference between the two methods used.

In the first one, for parabolas and hyperbolas, at least two diagonal lines are produced that are mirror images of each other. For the second method, a straight horizontal line or a straight vertical line is produced. Something else I will have to make adjustments for.

Session 973 is vertical. Class dismissed.