Overview
It's that time again! Please login to https://nova.direct.iota360.cc with your VCCS email address as your user name and your NVCC student id as your password and complete the course evaluation.
This week we will begin our last topic for the course, Chapter 4: Sequences.
Thursday, May 14th
Classwork / Homework
As the school year draws rapidly toward a close, our schedule gets ever crazier. We meet twice next week: Thursday May 21st from 1:40 to 3:00 pm, and Friday, May 22nd at our regular time. I will be out on Friday, so I would like to plan today for both days next week.
Here is my proposal:
- Students who signed up to present an additional exercise from Section 4.1: Describing Sequences do so today.
- I'll assign the remaining exercises to students who have yet to present to be shared in class on Thursday afternoon.
- You can work independently on Section 4.2: Rate of Growth next Friday.
- We will have a quiz on sections 4.1 and 4.2 at the beginning of class on Friday, May 29th.
We'll confirm this in class today.
Tuesday, May 12th
Classwork
Today in class we will discuss Section 4.1: Describing Sequences.
Goals for this section are to be able to:
- use proper notation to represent a sequence.
- explain the difference between a closed formula and a recursive definition for a sequence.
- find a recursive definition for a sequence based on its description.
We'll take a look at this Towers of Hanoi program, one of countless others you can find on the Internet (including the one in our text), but one which I like this one because it has a nice drag and drop user interface.
We will then select volunteers to present the additional exercises below.
| Describing Sequences Additional Exercises | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exercise | Presenter | Exercise | Presenter | Exercise | Presenter | Exercise | Presenter |
| 1 | Arya & Jeff | 5 | Waleed | 9 | Evan | 13 | |
| 2 | Sean | 6 | Mason | 10 | 14 | ||
| 3 | Giselle | 7 | 11 | 15 | |||
| 4 | Delanie | 8 | Antoan | 12 | 16 | ||
You'll have the rest of class to begin working through the section. You are highly encouraged to give your full attention to this first section, since in it we define the foundational mathematical ideas we will study for the rest of chapter.
I began a reference sheet in which I have reworded the definitions presented in the section is slightly more concise form. Let's make this a class project, by which I mean I welcome suggestions for modifications and improvements, like Dimitri did last chapter, so we can use this as a resource on our final test of the course.
Homework
Read Section 4.1: Describing Sequences, take notes in your git repo, and prepare your selected additional exercise for presentation in class on Thursday.