Christina K. Pikas is a science and engineering librarian in a special library as well as a doctoral student in information studies.
Led by Maria Droujkova and Blake Stacey.
We started with a pretty basic discussion of how to show math on the web. I use the math sandbox on mediawiki and use a png. B recommends replacemath.js http://mathcache.appspot.com/static/docs.html – it also provides an alt tag that has the LaTeX in it. Sitmo – LaTeX equation editor is one M has had some success with.
Example – Radiometer – the very simple thing- requires very complex analysis using kinetic theory of gases… so visualization from Greg Egan.
B took a bunch of computers they bought for some unsuccessful physics education initiative and redesigned the first few courses to have a modeling and simulation problem that required the computers each week. This gives more of a real feeling for how physicists work. M makes the point that it doesn’t matter that it might be simplistic – the students make it themselves and it fascinates them. B shows an example using python which is quite easy to use (M says it’s like the new basic).
M went over her mindmap on Natural Math (see the wiki page). Need attention to how to learn math and the psychology of math, and things like science fairs for math – not with set problems to solve, but to set a problem and work it out.
