Posts Tagged Undergraduate seminar

Presentation workshop – Minnes

his lesson plan outlines a workshop on giving seminar presentations. The workshop was conducted in Mia Minnes’ Undergraduate Seminar in Logic at M.I.T. after each student had presented to the class once. The workshop included a discussion of the students’ experiences presenting, two sample presentations given by the instructor to illustrate common pitfalls and how to avoid them, a discussion of the rhetorical differences between seminar presentations and class lectures, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of various forms of presentation (slides, board, overhead).

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On teaching math communication

This 18-page resource for math instructors addresses questions of how to teach communication in an undergraduate math seminar. Most of the document focuses on questions of grading and providing feedback to students on their writing. It was written for a workshop with M.I.T. math instructors preparing to teach communication-intensive undergraduate math seminars.

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Writing workshop questions for students

This one-page reading assignment presents questions for students to consider as they read a draft of one of their instructor’s published papers. This assignment precedes a workshop on how to write a paper, in which the students discuss the draft and a revised version of the paper as well as writing process. From Pedro Reis’ Undergraduate Seminar in Physical Applied Mathematics at MIT.

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Proposal for logic term paper HW

This assignment for a term paper asks students to propose a topic, list at least two sources, and provide an outline of the paper. Included in the assignment is a list of suggested term paper topics related to the focus of the undergraduate seminar: Kolmogorov complexity and algorithmic randomness. From Mia Minnes’ Undergraduate Seminar in Logic at M.I.T.

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Presentation workshop–Carnahan

This one-page outline summarizes a workshop on how to give a mathematics presentation. The instructor begins by giving a practice run of a real talk he will be presenting shortly in another context, students critique the talk in pairs and then the class as a whole discusses the highest priorities for improving the talk. This workshop occurs at the beginning of the term before students have begun giving their own presentations, so the instructor concludes the workshop with some “veteran advice” for how to prepare a presentation. Links are included to handouts for critiquing a presentation and for preparing a

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