So... I took my Calc IIIA final Saturday. After going through the test review, I was worried that the test was going to be one of those stupid ones where they assume that in a pure math exam, you implicitly know that A is X'' is Acceleration. Luckily, that was far from the truth. The test was actually really fun (well... fun as tests go,) because the teacher had themed the test around Superman. So we where helping Superman to fight the evil gradient man, leap over tall buildings, and escape the vile kryptonite gas by applying gradients, tangent planes, and multidimensional projectile motion.

Ok, so it's a little bit romanticised, but in general the theme helped add a bit of flavor to what would have been an otherwise boring test, which I am pretty sure I got at least a 90 percent on. (Which means no more Calc IIIA forever and ever... Yea!)

The question then becomes: is that something I would like to see all my teachers do on their tests? Did it help me in completing the exam, and did it help me more thoroughly demonstrate my understanding of the topic? I'd have to say yes. Because the questions where entertaining to read, my mood was kept high, even though I was sitting there churning numbers for 2 straight hours (and on the projectile motion one, doing half a billion large value arithmetic operations.) But the alternate approach gave me another important advantage: in order to relate the problems to the actions of Superman, the problems couldn't be abstract. For example, the gradient problem was formed as

"The nefarious Gradiantman has a kryptonite gas gun and has used it on Superman. The gas cloud follows the function (insert 4D function here). Superman, trying to escape the cloud takes a step in the direction shared with the vector (Insert 3D vector here). Was this a good idea?"

The equation was an ellipsoid (Which makes sense for a gas gun). And with all of this I could visualize the struggling Superman coughing and stumbling about in this thick green cloud. With a little manipulation I could find the center of the cloud and see him moving about in relation to it. It made setting up the problem much, much easier.

However, I can also see how this approach could be detrimental as well. If the teacher spent too much time focusing on the 'unique' presentation, and not enough time on selecting good test questions, the problems could quickly become too difficult to solve in the allotted time. Even worse, it's possible that the presentation itself could be too distracting, and cause some students to wander off into dream land instead of focusing on their test.

None-the-less, I would be more than happy to take more tests setup like this one.




- posted by Jim The Cactus @ 3/15/2004 01:13:21 PM | Permalink | (0) Comments. Add your own!