Phil's PFMF Projects

GSS Coordinator     

I worked with Eric Gehrig for the 2003-2004 academic year as co-coordinator of the graduate student seminars for the mathematics department.  These were held to allow our fellow graduate students present any research they were working on to their peers.  We held a total of 13 seminars during the school year and provided food and beverages to the audience.  There is a list of speakers and their respective abstract on the PFMF website.  My duties included the following:

 

  1. Find speakers. We recruited via email and by asking people we know were interested.

  2. Make room reservations by contacting Irina Long. We tried to vary the time as much as possible to accommodate both our speakers and our audience.

  3. Let the speaker know that s/he needs to provide you with a title and abstract (by email) a week or two before the seminar date in order to advertise. Also find out what equipment they might need (overhead projector, laptop, proxima, blackboard).

  4. Provide Debbie Olson with this information so that she can make the flyers to be put in grad student mailboxes. This should occur about a week before the seminar date. Ask Renate or Stephanie/Patrick for the availability of laptop and proxima, if needed. Also send an email to the math department graduate students.

  5. Buy the ice and drinks. We were reimbursed for these expenses.

  6. Coordinate with Debbie Olson to order the food.

  7. Pick up food, drinks and supplies and make sure they are ready for the talk.

  8. Clean up after the talk

  Course Website Development

I was involved in creating a class in data analysis and probability for teachers in Fall 2003 which we then implemented in Spring 2004.  As part of my second project I developed a website for this course that the students could navigate to find projects, homework and other important items from class.  It also involved updates and links to other related websites. 

The website allowed students access to electronic copies of everything we used in class along with additional activities we never used.  This way teachers could use the activities in their own classrooms and modify them as they see fit.  They had easy access to course materials and were also able to retrieve any handouts they missed in class.  The students found it very useful to have easy access to electronic copies of activities they could use in their classroom.

For future use I would like to make the website more interactive.  The website included a dice simulator and tools for working with a normal curve, but I would like to extend this in the future.  I want students to be able to focus on data analysis and trends without getting caught up in some of the tedious calculations.  I would like more tools that will allow them to play with data and calculate the various statistics that we learn about in class.

Guest Speaker Host

Nicole Engelke and I collaborated to bring in Dr. Paul Cobb, a very distinguished math educator from Vanderbilt (Tennessee) to come speak at Arizona State on September 9th, 2004.  He will be giving a presentation on the role of identity in the mathematics classroom.

In order to bring him in we had to do the following:

  1. Contact him to see if he wanted to visit
  2. Decide on a time where he can come to the valley for a few days
  3. Work with Joann Person to create a budget for his visit.  We had to consider:
    1. Hotel and flight
    2. Per Diem
    3. Money for dinner with faculty and graduate students
    4. Honorarium
  4. Get sources to commit to money.  We received money from the following sources:
    1. Dr. Michelle Zandieh
    2. PFMF
    3. CRESMET
  5. We had to create a schedule for his visit
  6. Work with Bruce Long to advertise his visit
  7. Make sure Dr. Cobb has rides around town

Some noteworthy things about Dr. Cobb

  1. research interests focus on students' mathematical learning as it occurs in the social context of the classroom
  2. conducts classroom design experiments to investigate innovative instructional approaches in inquiry-based classrooms
  3. Paul's work is currently being funded by the National Science Foundation through a grant entitled Mathematizing, Symbolizing, and Communicating
  4. This work is being augmented by complementary work funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement through the National Research and Development Center for Improving Student Learning and Achievement in Mathematics and Science.