building a community of computational thinkers wayne patterson howard university

“BUILDING A COMMUNITY OF COMPUTATIONAL THINKERS”Wayne PattersonHoward University

This course is now in the catalog as SYCS 501, 3 credits

Being offered this Fall

CIRTL Students + others

Math Department has asked for a variation of this course (probably at a 1-credit level) for Spring 2011

ulang tahun

verjaardag

Cumpleaños

There are:

365 days in a year

25 people in a group

So what’s the chance that for a given group of 25, two people will have the birthdate (not necessarily the same year)?

365 days …………. 25 people …….

25 365 = 6.8%

Something that occurs with 6.8% probability occurs once every 14.6 times

Arizona Diamondbacks Active Roster

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L-R 6’0”

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4 Rusty Ryal R-R 6’2”

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Chicago Cubs Active Roster

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L-L 6’7”

220 08/30/82

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Florida Marlins Active Roster

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New York Mets Active Roster

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New York Yankees Active Roster

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Toronto Blue Jays Active Roster

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Philadelphia Phillies Active Roster

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San Diego Padres Active Roster

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San Francisco Giants Active Roster

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R-R 6’3”

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Washington Nationals Active Roster

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R-R 6’2”

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13

Hopes for the Course

Think of a question where your first instinct is a qualitative analysis

Learn how to recast the problem computationally

Acquire some tools to facilitate the computations

Design approaches to teaching the computational approach

Carry out the computational solution and the TAR approach

Example 2: Oprah Winfrey’s Cars

There is a lady named Oprah

She has a television show

She gives away cars to some of her fans

But she has a problem

She only has ten shows left before she retires

But she has 500 cars to give away

But being a fair person, she doesn’t want to give an additional car to one of her audiences that increase the ratio between the number of persons per car

SOLUTION:

The Oprah-Huntington-Hill Algorithm

Example 3: Counting Heads

How do we take a census?

1, 2, 3, 4, …

HTC Tracts What are they, where are they, how big are

they

Undercount How to estimate it, what’s the potential cost

Sampling techniques

Example 4: Pay Baseball Players or Soccer Players? I use some of my retirement income and

buy the New York Yankees and Manchester United

Will I get a better return (in terms of wins) by paying higher salaries to my baseball team or my soccer team?