Maths CSG Discussion

From StpmWiki

Contents 1 Issues 1.1 Copyright 1.2 Past Year Questions 1.3 Editing 1.4 How You May Help 2 Guidelines 2.1 Guidance 2.2 Images/Diagrams 3 How This Maths Complete Study Guide Was Built 3.1 Stage 1 ( 2 years ) 3.2 Stage 2 ( 2 years ) 3.3 Stage 3 ( 2 years ) 3.4 Stage 4 ( 2 years ) 3.5 Stage 5 ( ?? ) 4 How This Maths Complete Study Guide Is Used

Issues

Copyright

The main contents should be free of copyrighted materials. Exception, however, is made for past year questions. I sure hope that MPM wouldn't mind. There is also the matter of students posting questions from copyrighted books and StpmWiki providing solutions & guidance to it. Hopefully the publishers won't mind, though if they do, we will just remove the said questions.

Good questions together with solution and guidance should then moved to "Misc questions". Note though, that the only suitable types of questions that should be made permanent content are difficult questions which are different from the basic questions in StpmWiki, and it must also not just be a rehash of some past year questions.

Past Year Questions

My school don't have a complete past year question set. I do plan to someday go back to my own secondary school and scan a set. If anyone have already done it though, please let me know. Note though, that the past year question part of the complete study guide serves the objective of being as a revision exercise to complement the StpmWiki lesson. Being a complete repository for past year questions comes as a secondary objective rather than the main objective.

Editing

• Careless mistakes & spelling mistakes and all other minor mistakes can be corrected directly by anyone willing to spend the time to do it and there is no need to contact me about it ( I will know about it from the logs)
• For everything else, its best to discuss about it first.

How You May Help

--Senghong79 09:32, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Some background

I have only completed very few subtopics, such as set algebra, AP & GP, binomial expansion. These are mostly complete, together with worksheets and past year questions, but there some things I still need to do, such as adding guidance to exercises and to all past year questions. I have also listed the to do's in the Discussion for Teachers page for the subtopic.

How you might help

It could be something as simple as

• Help me correct my horrendous English (grammar in particular)
• Help me spot/correct for careless mistakes ( my students can be witness to how very careless I am!)
• Help me with collecting past year questions (including the information about the marks allocated to each question), or better yet, scan EVERYTHING for reference if you have a complete collection.

To something more

• Help me improve on the lessons/worksheets
• You can also add alternative ways/notes/questions to the lessons itself; However, it might not be added to the worksheet yet, and it might also be helpful to sign off it (i.e. write your name after what you add)
• Add more tough/varied questions to the Misc questions section, together with solutions and guidance --> I think this will be a good place to start. Have some particular question that you just know the students won't be able to solve? Put them here. I think the publishers won't sue us, but of course we can't copy the solution (from Q& A books, for example), and we really should add guidance rather than just the solution.

Supplementary Materials

One of the main reason I use wiki software is that it is versatile. If you would like to contribute something entirely out of the current structure, you are still very WELCOMED to do so. Say,

• You want to write a general "How to prepare for exams"
• You want to upload your school's Trial paper with solutions
• You want to upload pdf, powerpoint files on your working paper / action research / your teaching experience...

Guidelines

Guidance

• each exercise should have pre- and post- notes
  • pre-notes : tell the students what they have to know and prepare before doing the exercise
  • post-notes : emphasize on when and why certain methods are used
• subtopics that require vastly different methods for different questions that look similar should always have a revision exercise to help students identify the method required for different types of questions

Images/Diagrams

• My search for a method for diagrams which is as good as the method for equations have not been successful.
  • File Formats - The ideal file format would have been svg (vector graphics), but it seems like there are too many issues as of now
    • While most modern browsers do support native rendering of svg, microsoft's internet explorer sticks out as a sore thumb.
    • The other option is to upload svg's, and let mediawiki render them and display the png's, but it depends on a external program. The best one will require a lot of work to be done by our host on the server (it was stated that it requires a ridiculous amount of dependencies), so I doubt they will do it. The default method works (it uses ImageMagick) but it is stated that it is buggy.
    • While svg can serve as a good format for rendering and displaying, it seems that different software edits them differently. Thus, when we import it to another editor (or even the original editor), we lose the ability to edit it in the way it was originally created. We will still need to share the source file along with the svg, which takes away one of the reason I wanted to use it in the first place.
  • Editors
    • Dia - A diagramming program that is said to be like Microsoft's Visio, but with some limitations such as no rotation of objects. Svg output is also buggy and needs to be fixed by using another program such as Inkscape
    • Inkscape - Supposedly to have better svg support, but it is design more for artistic work rather than diagramming work
    • OpenOffice Draw - This would be the closest to what most people is used to - Microsoft's Word picture drawing. But it comes as part of OpenOffice suite, a very much larger download compared to the two above.

• My choice for now is to use Dia, export it as PNG's and also include the .dia files as source file. There is very little reason left to use svg, other than on the fly rescaling of images. When support of svg becomes better, at least we still can re-export them into svgs using the .dia files.

How This Maths Complete Study Guide Was Built

This is a rough history of how this guide got to this point, and where it should go from here. Each stage have been roughly 2 years because it represents one batch of maths students (I only get one batch every two years because I have to teach physics too)

Stage 1 ( 2 years )

My first years of teaching, and I basically just taught from the text book and from my own experience and knowledge (I was however, teaching paper 2). What was crucial was the time spent with students, either helping them with daily homework or guiding them to do some past year questions when it was near STPM. Instead of saying two years of teaching, I should say 2 years of learning. I learn about their various misconceptions, about which concept they find particularly difficult, and probably saw more questions than I ever did when I was studying form 6 myself.

Stage 2 ( 2 years )

Armed with more knowledge and experience, I then set out to prepare my lessons fully (I taught paper 1), with notes and all, although some of the examples are chosen from books, and exercises are just assigned from textbooks. I have a fairly good idea of all the concepts needed by them and all the different common types of question. There was however, much to be improved ; too much time is used by students to copy notes, the lessons and textbook exercises don't always tally. Basically the better than average students benefited a lot (very high percentage of A/A-) that year, the weaker ones suffer (the art class result was horrible).

Stage 3 ( 2 years )

A very time consuming stage. I have already decided on StpmWiki by then, and thus, I know that 100% of my lesson have to come from myself. And instead of students copying everything, I prepared carefully laid out worksheets, complete with notes, example, and exercises. I was only teaching an art class. It was so time consuming that I rarely did spend time with students at all.

Stage 4 ( 2 years )

Stage 4 was supposed to run concurrently with stage 3, but instead got pushed to the next batch. This is the current stage. With the lessons already prepared (although considerable time is still needed to improve and fix some things), I have the time to put the lessons online at StpmWiki. Ideally, the online lessons have to be finished at least directly after a subtopic is finished, but I have been behind time. Hopefully the holidays can be put me back on track. If on schedule, then it will mean that I will complete the syllabus of paper 1 by end of 2010. It will basically mean we have a complete textbook right here at StpmWiki.

Stage 5 ( ?? )

There is, of course, fine tuning and fixing things from the feedback and observation of students weaknesses. This is supposed to run concurrently with stage 4, but priority has to be given to completing the syllabus in time. Everything that can't be dealt with, however, needs to be noted down for further future action.

There is also the plan to provide guidance for every exercise (right now there is only solution), and also expanding things like question banks and tackling high level difficult questions. Also, true discussion and sharing of knowledge among teachers.

All these are rather continuous process, so stage 5 don't have a dateline (though I do hope to get most things off ground by end of stage 4).

There is also the matter of starting work on Paper 2 if I am given the chance (I will have to start from stage 3, skipping stage 2), and starting work on physics (It has been stuck at stage 2 for a very long time)

How This Maths Complete Study Guide Is Used

--Senghong79 16:48, 14 August 2009 (MYT)

• Students who can go online at home can refer to it on their own
• Students who can't go online but have computers are loaned pen drives which are periodically updated
• Students who don't have computers are loaned cheap second hand netbooks
• Feasibility of ipod touches are being examined, while waiting for a touch-colour-10-inch-screen-tablet-with-browser-capability-and-usb/memory card slot-for-under-RM500.

--Senghong79 17:24, 14 August 2009 (MYT)

• The recent H1N1 thing and other factors affecting students attendance reminds me how useful StpmWiki is. Haha... actually, it just makes me less guilty to tell them "Go read on your own."
• Also, being able to finish the polynomial part, no students can have any excuse when I ask them to hand up their homework for checking next week...

--Senghong79 13:36, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

• Ten ipods have now been deployed, 8 netbooks for students without computer and those particularly weak ones, and pendrives for each.
• And I am still behind time...