building a community of computational thinkers wayne patterson howard university
TRANSCRIPT
“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
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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?