This week's session notes - Week 4 (21 and 23 August 2018)

Hi everyone

On Tuesday we started with a bit of a discussion around Assignment 1 (due this Thursday). It sounds as if most students are well underway for submitting this assignment on time, but there were some questions around the level of detail required for some of the tasks and also relating to referencing of the sound clips.

Some of the tasks in Assignment 1 are very straight-forward and don’t leave much room for debate. For instance, ‘what is the name of the article or clip?’ is very simple: Give me the correct name of the article or clip that you chose and you will score 1 mark.

However, I would like to see a bit more thought for some of the other tasks. ‘Where did the article or clip come from and how did you locate it?’ is a two-part question and I am expecting to see something more than ‘I found it on the internet’. For instance, think about what you were searching for, why it attracted your attention and how it fits with the assignment.

The 5 mark tasks also require some deeper thought. For instance, if you are discussing behavioural or developmental issues in problem solving and decision making, then make sure that you back this up with some critical insights and maybe some PSDM theory. Remember that, at this level, you are expected to be doing your own independent learning outside the classroom, using the Resource Book and other sources of information. Try to integrate some of this learning into your assignment and ‘show off’ your knowledge.

While some of our assignment work is designed to give you an opportunity to use your own experiences (e.g. part of Assignment 3), it is important to always link your work back to some sort of academic basis, given that you are studying at tertiary level.

You should also get into the habit of reviewing your work and asking yourself ‘what would I award marks for if I was marking this particular piece of work?’ This technique helps in the development of a critical appreciation of academic work (your own work as well as that of the authors whom you might read).

After the break, Rachael, from the Whitireia library, popped in to talk to us about referencing the sound clips. She showed us some useful resources on the library website, including links to various APA referencing resources. Some of the sound clip referencing is quite arcane so, as long as you make an honest effort to use the APA referencing style guide, I will not expect absolutely accurate use of the sound clip referencing requirements.

Following that, we moved on to the main part of Tuesday’s session, which was about algorithms.

I started by introducing you to Katey Forth. Katey is an ex-NASA neurophysiologist who was involved in research around how the mind and body respond to weightless environments. Katey’s particular area of interest was around how the human body responds to zero-gravity and this led her into research around how we may be able to predict the chance of someone falling over.

This is a far more complex area of study than we might imagine, as walking (and running) always involves controlled falling, followed by recovery of balance. We also know that healthy people can fall unexpectedly (think back to the last time you might have lost your balance) and that people who look doddery or infirm can be very good at managing their balance (which can be why they do look doddery in their movements!)

Forth and her team have developed models which help them to make accurate predictions about who is actually in danger of falling. Her predictive algorithms allow us to differentiate between people who (on the one hand) look and act doddery but are in no real danger of falling over and (on the other) people who are at risk.

I can see exactly what she is talking about in the case of my own elderly parents: My mother looked incredibly unsteady on her feet in her latter years but she only ever fell over once, that I know of. This was a combination of her ability to adapt to her limitations and a low neurophysiological risk of becoming physically unbalanced.

So, in order to solve the problem of how to prevent falls, Forth is suggesting that we should look less at whether someone ‘looks’ like they are in danger of falling over (or even whether they are in the ‘danger demographic’) and more at what measurable data tells us about sensory / motor-skills / impairments.

Being able to correctly predict falls is a good example of a problem which has BIG implications in other areas (e.g. for ACC, health, aged-care, retirement homes, etc.) In fact, Katey has now left NASA and she is working on her own business, building algorithms to predict falling. For more about Katey, see http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/201810131/katey-forth-nasa-researcher,-entrepreneur-and-frisbee-whizz).

This discussion then led us to think about what an algorithm is and why it is useful in problem solving and decision making. An algorithm is:

* A self-contained step-by-step set of operations to be performed to reach a solution.

* A set of rules for solving a problem in a finite number of steps

* A procedure for reaching a solution.

You might like to think of an algorithm as a fancy word for a recipe. Recipes are simple sets of finite instructions for solving the problem of turning raw food materials into edible and appetising meals.

Algorithms also help us to clearly and accurately interpret information in order to reach sound decisions. As such, they are part of the scientific method and an important part of logical, sequential and critical thinking.

I then asked you to write your own algorithm for a task which involved turning over playing cards and arranging them in numerical order. The idea behind this exercise is to build a really good algorithm that someone with only limited knowledge can accomplish. This is sometimes referred to as ‘the man from Mars’ test (i.e. assume absolutely no knowledge on the users behalf) and it is especially important when building algorithms for ‘dumb’ systems, such as computers.

At the end of the exercise, we brought someone into the classroom (Lawrence, who served as our ‘Martian’) to see if he could follow your instructions and accomplish the task (which he did).

On Thursday, we re-visited the Newspaper Towers exercise from last week.

Our objective was to take our observations and experiences from the practical PSDM exercise last week, and to try to distil them down into some key learnings. In the next few weeks we will take this a step further, and try to apply our experiences to various PSDM models that academics have come up. Hopefully, this will give us some useful insights which we can apply in Assignments 2 and 3.

Our Newspaper Towers exercise started with the class breaking into the same groups as last week. We then reviewed what we did last week and group members shared their own observations and reflections with the rest of the group. BTW, observation and reflection are two important elements in problem solving, as they allow us to gather information and to organise it.

After this, we moved on to preparing over slideshows and presentations. Each group was asked to prepare a slideshow consisting of seven slides, to which the group would speak:

* One title slide for your presentation.

* One slide describing the overall problem that you attempted to solve

* One slide describing the solution that you came up with

* One slide summarising all the important steps that you took when doing this exercise. Try to construct a diagram showing these steps.

* One slide identifying problems that arose during the exercise. Briefly mention all the problems that you encountered (practical, interpersonal, planning, etc.) and the order in which they arose.

* One slide discussing how you dealt with the problems that you encountered. Were you able to solve these problems? If yes, then how did you solve each problem? If no, then what happened?

* One slide describing what you learned from this exercise. How did this exercise help you to develop your awareness of problem solving?

The groups then presented their slideshows to the class.

One group noted that their Newspaper Towers activity matched the forming-storming-norming-performing model while the other group felt that their activity didn’t really match any particular model.

Over the next few weeks, we will start looking at various PSDM models and then test them against our experiences in this, and other exercises.

Cheers

Phil