Fall 2023: The first post of the semester

It's been a while since my last update, and I've had a busy summer filled with various enriching activities. I had the privilege of participating in an undergraduate workshop in Utah, where I shared my insights. Additionally, I was invited as a speaker at a Data Science workshop hosted by IPAM at UCLA, where I had the opportunity to deliver an engaging one-day tutorial. My summer also included a visit to my former PhD advisors in Oregon, during which we engaged in discussions about some truly exciting research. At present, I'm deeply engrossed in teaching precalculus and statistics with probability this semester. I must say, I'm genuinely thrilled about the progress my students are making and the lively interactions taking place within the classroom. It's become increasingly evident to me how crucial it is to establish open and honest communication with students to truly gauge their comprehension. In my precalculus class, we've delved into topics like absolute value inequalities, functions, and the transformations that can be applied to function graphs. Just recently, on Wednesday, 9/20, I assigned a class activity comprising six questions, expecting it to take no more than 30 minutes. Initially, my plan was to introduce my students to the various features of the TI-84 calculator. However, due to technical constraints (I didn't have the visual calculator installed), I decided to spend some time assessing their grasp of vertical and horizontal shifts. Specifically, we explored how to formulate functions after applying horizontal or vertical shifts, as well as stretching away from or compressing towards the y-axis. To my pleasant surprise, I witnessed several "aha" moments among my students, and I firmly believe that these breakthroughs are some of the most gratifying occurrences during class time. In the statistics with probability course, we've covered fundamental statistical concepts such as sample mean, median, variance, and more, along with the intricacies of box plots. I've also introduced a DataCamp classroom for this course, and I'm pleased to report that the students have successfully completed the introduction to Python course. Furthermore, they've become adept at creating Google Colab notebooks and tweaking Python code. They can do now a basic loop. They've worked extensively with the statistics library and pandas, they had fun importing CSV files into data frames and conducting basic data exploration. In the near future, we'll be delving into linear regression using the classic advertising data from the "Intro Statistical Learning" book by James et al. I've encouraged my students to proudly display their Intro Python certificates on their LinkedIn profiles, should they have one. All in all, I'm ecstatic about the commencement of the fall season!