New Projects for 2014!

  By Robert Watson | 4 January, 2014 - 23:12 | , , ,
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So far 2014 is off to an odd start. I came down with a cold, and I had a hard drive die on me. Granted, neither of these things are as bad as could be. The new semester has not started yet, and I make backups. So I seem to have averted a sad tale about how I should be backing up my stuff.

Protip: go backup your stuff. Now 😉

I usually don’t make resolutions for the new year. New Years Day is typically a time to reflect on yourself and where you’re headed. But I do that on a consistent basis anyway. Nevertheless, I’ve had time to contemplate the inner regions of my soul, and have the following to consider over the next few weeks.

  1. Why does every episode of Downton Abbey start with a generous shot of a dog’s butt? I need to get to the bottom* of this. There’s a story here, I’m sure.
  2. I’m no longer buying mechanical hard drives.
  3. Clean the virtual shed.

I’m a “data squirrel.” For a while, every time I upgraded to a new hard drive, I dumped the contents of the old one into a single folder. This new drive was then dumped into it’s own folder on the next upgrade, and so on and so forth. I have virtual Matryoshka dolls that go back to ~1989. You know who has the high score in the family copy of Dungeon of Shalan? Me. And I have the high score table to prove it.

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I also have my copy of Monkey Island. Sadly, I don’t have the Dial-A-Pirate that goes with it… not that I couldn’t make a new one. (Thanks, Google!)

I’ve been toying with the idea of making a game or two to help promote An Ember in the Wind. The trick is to find something that would appeal to the sorts of people who may enjoy the book. I think a SCUMM-like point-and-click adventure game (like Monkey Island!) would be just the thing. I’ve also been wanting to experiment a bit more with the presentation of the Mara of the Ori riddles. This would be a good way to do both. And maybe I could make a tacky copy-protection device, like Dial-A-Squirrel.

The best part is, I already have a pretty good library of scenes. Throughout the past year I drew a lot of scenes from Fordham Forest, and they link together pretty well. I’m not thinking anything too big – although larger than a “roomisode.”

The hardest part will be doing animations. Most likely, I’d base the game off of the entire “A Conundrum of Eggs” series (including the third part that hasn’t been published). Most of my efforts will go into animating the two playable characters, Mara, and Ry the Squirrel. I’ve not studied animation very much at all, but I’ve also never been opposed to learning new things.

In the meantime, think about this. It’s 2014.

2 0 1 4.

2  0  1  4.

Isn’t that weird?

* sorry.

The Earth and the Rope Riddle

  By Robert Watson | 21 December, 2013 - 17:01 | ,
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Here’s a riddle I read on What If? (xkcd). I did a little experiment with it. But first, I’ll let you try to answer it for yourself.

Suppose you tied a rope around the Earth and tightened it so that every inch was hugging the surface. Now suppose you want to raise the rope one meter off the ground at every point. How much extra length would you need to add to the rope?

A. 6.28cm;  B. 6.28m;  C. 6.28km;  D. 734km

The multiple choices aren’t part of the original riddle, but I added them for my own purposes.

I tend to test my lower-level classes more frequently (so that the stakes on each test are lower). During the Fall semester, I have classes on three different schedules. Around Thanksgiving all the schedules line up. It’s a madhouse of grading that is actually harder to work with than finals week. The circumstances did make for a nice opportunity, though.

I gave the same multiple choice riddle on all five tests. It was a bonus, and the results were a little surprising. If you haven’t answered it for yourself, give it a try before reading on.

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The answer is B, which may come as a surprise that so little rope would be needed. But by raising the rope 1m, you’re increasing the diameter of the rope circle by 2m. This means you’re increasing the circumference by about 6.28m (2 pi). The initial size of the circle doesn’t matter; we’re only discussing how much we’re changing its size.

So how did my classes do? Here’s what I taught last semester, excluding the online class that didn’t receive the question.

1. Intermediate Algebra. This course covers the prerequisites to College Algebra. I had expected most of the students would guess. The question is a bit beyond that level of mathematics. As such, about 25% of the students got the question right – which is what you’d expect if everyone guessed. The selections were also chosen more uniformly.

The surprising result to me is only 13 of 27 students attempted it, although I emphasized there was no penalty for getting it wrong. I think by the end of the hour, the majority of the class simply forgot about it. It was written on the board, not the exam itself.

2. College Algebra. About a quarter of the students got this question right, but fewer people selected A. More thought seemed to go into the guesses – but they were still just that – guesses.

3. Precalculus. I was a little disappointed that only a quarter of the students got this right. We had just finished the trigonometry unit. More people worked out some math this time, but there was still a tendency to guess too high. Almost nobody selected A.

4. Calculus I. This is a 200-level class. About a third of the class got the question right – some improvement! Just like in Precalculus, almost nobody selected A.

5. Calculus III. Now we’re in the 300-level range. 80% of the class got it right. This was also the only class in which everyone attempted the problem.

I spent some time trying to figure out why only one class did significantly better than 25%, and I could only come up with one explanation. The first three classes are 100-level, and tend to emphasize mathematical skills more than anything else. They’re prerequisites. I emphasize how to “think like a mathematician,” but you do need to know how to do some math beforehand. After all, you can’t teach someone to write a novel until they have a basic grasp of spelling and grammar. You can’t think like a mathematician until you have a basic grasp of fundamental mathematics.

Calculus III was populated by math and math-ed majors – mostly students who will be teaching mathematics themselves after they graduate. Calculus I was a mix, mostly consisting of freshmen students who had Precalculus or Calculus AB in high school the year before. High schools tend to not emphasize critical thinking as heavily as in college. The primary difficulty in this question is resisting the temptation to guess too high.

Vacation

  By Robert Watson | 29 November, 2013 - 23:34 |
1 Comment

I’m taking a quick “vacation” – and by that I mean, it’s the start of final exam season and I’m managing six classes. In the meantime, let’s start a new feature.

 

Small Updates

Here’s what you may have missed if Nanowrimo, final exams, or both have turned you into a hermit.

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1. My wife, Elizabeth, was featured on Kisa Whipkey’s blog, Nightwolf’s Corner. If you’ve read the acknowledgements page of A Foundation in Wisdom, you may recognize Kisa as the editor. She’s also the senior editor at REUTS publications. Go check out Elizabeth’s article, “How to Judge a Book by Its Cover”!

2. Go check out Kisa’s new serial book, Unmoving. Serial books has been a relatively frequent topic on this blog, and Unmoving sounds like a good read. If you’re a member of DeviantART, Wattpad, Figment, or Authonomy, just add it to your watch-list, or for a one-time $2.99 charge, you can subscribe for a VIP, advance first-look.

3. I’m currently playing with Stencyl; like GameMaker and Construct2, it’s a Flash/App authoring tool. Although intended for 2D games, I’m investigating its potential as an alternate to Bowker’s “Your book as an app” service and Socrative in the classroom. More on that later.

4. I got a digital painting featured on the MyPaint homepage. MyPaint is a great FOSS digital painting tool. I prefer it over GIMP for the painting process – although GIMP still has its place in the final preparations.

5. Nanowrimo has almost come to an end, and there seems to have been a substantial drop in the number of participants. I’ll be interested to see how this year’s stats compare to the previous years.