exercises and assessment
OR 6205 in-class exercises in both the worked and student versions, at-home simplex theory exercises, and the project rubric and worksheet
The scaffolding materials are the highest-rated thing in my evaluations. Students rated the online course materials 4.80 against a departmental 4.45. So I publish them in both versions, the one students got and the one I worked, because the difference between them is where the teaching is.
In-class exercises
Four artists are assigned to three murals over an eight-week project. Each artist is better at some murals than others, each mural needs a minimum number of hours before it counts as finished, paint costs differ by mural, and the budget is fixed. Students build the formulation on the board, in groups, before anything is solved. The goal is to discuss the complexity of assessing and measuring subjective concepts as “beauty”, “value of art”, etc.
Every in-class exercise was formative and ungraded by design, so that attempting a problem carried no penalty. That choice had a cost I did not anticipate, and I write about it on the evaluations page.
At-home exercises
Guided exercises on Google collab - Completed exercise.
The project, and how it was graded
Students worked in teams on a route optimization project from Boston to Florida, building two models with different objectives. Each student then wrote an individual report, because a team result does not tell me what any one person understood.
The first criterion in the rubric is worth 25 of the points and it is not about the model. It asks students to show the reasoning behind each modeling choice, in the form of what was chosen, what the alternatives were, why this one, and what it cost. A correct model with no justification does not clear the bar.