Draper Building
CPO 2146
859-985-3563
Office Hours:
M–F, 8:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Contact:
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| Motivation
for Involving Undergraduates in Research |
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- Our Own Undergraduate Research Experiences
- Research of Interest to the
Faculty
- Interesting to Students
- Real Benefit to Society
- Involve Interesting Mathematical
Problems
- The Experience of Research
- Frustration and Excitement of
Open-Ended Questions whose Answer is Unknown
- Perseverance
- Real Applications of Abstract
Mathematical Ideas
- What Does A Researcher or An Applied
Mathematician Do?
- The Tools of Research
- Mathematics
- The Internet (Good & Bad)
- Journal Articles and Books
- Computer Software
- Supplement to Classroom Experience
- Working with a Client
- Simplifications and Assumptions
- Interdisciplinary Nature of
the Real World
- Biology: Pharmacokinetics
- Chemistry: Wall Collision Number
- Forestry
- Economics/Business
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Textbook problems in most disciplines are extremely useful in helping
students learn and practice concepts and techniques. Modeling problems found
in the real world may be no harder to solve than those problems found in
textbooks, however, they are usually harder to identify and to isolate.
Textbook problems nearly always offer exactly the right amount of information
needed for a solution, rarely more, rarely less. In addition such problems
are nearly always written in a consistent language that is used throughout the
textbook, and they usually follow quickly after the presentation of a solution
technique appropriate for the problem. Perhaps this accounts for some of the
difficulty students often have in transferring knowledge from one course to
another, such as a student in a geology course who is not able to interpret the
meaning given by an earthquake travel-time graph (used to determine the
distance to the epicenter of the quake) even after having encountered similar
graphs in a precalculus class. The truth is that different disciplines use
different terminologies even to represent the same ideas, so the problems that
arise in these different disciplines are naturally packaged in different ways.
Worse, problems which arise in the real world do not come packaged at all.
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