MATH 2413.221 Calculus I Lab
Fall 2007
Meeting Time: F 10:00-11:50 AM
Instructor: Robyn Ball
Office: NRC 3405
Office Hours: TR 11:00-12:00 PM or By Appointment
Phone: 825-3643 (email will be faster)
e-mail: rball@islander.tamucc.edu
Lab Objective:
To learn calculus concepts by discovery, through guided exploration. The labs cover material that is closely related to the material from lecture, but learning in the lab is done by experimenting. Ideas that you discover yourself usually stick with you better than ideas that you were lectured on. The labs will use the software Derive which is installed on the lab computers in the CI building and on some labs in CCH.
Materials:
A floppy disk, zip disk, or flash
drive might help, however, space on your Islander
student account is available to save your work. Work saved on the C drive of
university computers will be erased. Save
Frequently. The labs are available as .pdf files
at http://math.tamucc.edu/MATHlabs/MATHlabs
You are read the labs before doing them in class. To submit you may need to print out parts of the labs. Printing cost on campus is 8 cents per page. You can use your SandDollar account for printing.
Grading:
Labs must be worked individually. You may talk to each other but each student must do his/her own work and answers should be in your own words. Turning in identical work as other students for any part of the lab is plagiarism. All students involved (original and copies) will receive a grade of zero points for the entire lab.
Labs count for 20% of your course grade for Calculus I. The final lab grade is given to the professor as a percentage and used in calculating your course grade.
For labs with three parts, the parts have the following weights in grading:
You are responsible for completing the Ready for the Lab part before showing up to the lab. This part of the lab is due at the beginning of the lab and will not be accepted late. For labs without the Ready for the Lab part or After the Lab part, the During the Lab part carries more weight. For Lab 1, attendance counts for 100% of the grade.
Lab grades will be posted online on Moodle: http://moodle.tamucc.edu/ To access your grades online you MUST use your campus Islander e-mail account. Other e-mail addresses will not work to get started with Moodle. Your graded labs will be given to your professor.
All questions concerning grades
must be resolved within one week. Please keep all your graded work until the
end of the semester. If you suspect a recording error, you may produce the
graded lab.
Submitting work:
Labs must be submitted on paper and in person or turned in by special arrangements with the TA. Leaving the labs in the box outside the TA office or with another TA does not count as a submission.
Important: Save your work
frequently on your student account. If the computer freezes up, you will lose
all the work since the last save.
Different parts of the lab are due at different times:
Labs must be submitted within the first 15 minutes of the lab or they are considered late. For any During the Lab and After the Lab part that is submitted after the deadline, but at most one week late, a 25% penalty applies. Anything During the Lab and After the Lab that is more than one week late receives no credit.
Missed Labs:
To be allowed to make up a missed lab you need (1) an excuse from the Students Affairs Office for your absence and, (2) permission from the Teaching Assistant who tells you when to submit the late lab. Usually you have one week to make up a lab missed due to a valid excuse. To accommodate minor emergencies, the lowest lab grade gets dropped at the end of the semester when calculating the semester average.
Lab Attendance:
It is strongly advised that you attend the lab sessions and submit your work on time. There will be a sign-in sheet during each lab. Nonattendance or leaving before you are done with the During the Lab part will lower your grade by 10% for the During the Lab part.
Gateway Test:The approach for this course emphasizes the understanding of mathematical concepts. To guarantee that you have the minimum computational skills needed to succeed in other classes requiring these concepts, you are required to take a gateway test, which deals exclusively with derivative computations. The test will show your computational proficiency on these topics. You can take this test up to three times to achieve the minimum proficiency required, which is 70%. No partial credit is given. When you take the test you are allowed to bring only a pen or pencil. No scratch paper, books, phones, calculators, etc. are allowed. The grade you obtain in these tests is 100%, 90% or 80%, 70%, or 0. In case you pass the test and still have not used all the allowed attempts, you can retake the test to improve your score. The gateway test counts for 10% of your course grade for Calculus I.
Tentative schedule:
|
WEEK OF |
|
|
8/20 |
First half week: no labs |
|
8/27 |
Lab 1 (Intro to Derive) |
|
9/3 |
Lab 2 (Functions and their graphs) |
|
9/10 |
Lab 3 (Introduction to Limits of Functions) |
|
9/17 |
Lab 4 (Explorations with the Slopes of Tangents) |
|
9/24 |
Lab 5 (Relationship between a function and its derivative) |
|
10/1 |
Lab 6 (Investigating the Intermediate Value Theorem and Fixed Points) |
|
10/8 |
Lab 7 (Linking up with the Chain Rule) |
|
10/15 |
Lab 8 ( |
|
10/22 |
Lab 9 (Applications of the Derivative) |
|
10/29 |
Gateway Test on Derivatives |
|
11/5 |
Lab 10 (It all adds up) |
|
11/12 |
Gateway Test on Derivatives second chance |
|
11/19 |
Thanksgiving week; no labs |
|
11/26 |
Gateway Test on Derivatives third chance |
|
12/3 |
No lab |
Disability Statement:
It is the responsibility of students who have disabilities to notify the Services for Students with Disabilities office, which will determine appropriate accommodations and outline them in a notification letter. You will then be asked to give this letter to your instructors. Without an accommodation plan, no student can be treated differently from the others.
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi