## Problem Solving for the Liberal Arts

March 7, 2014

I taught a “Math for Liberal Arts” course last semester based on Pólya-type problem solving. I want to change some things the next time I teach it, and I should write it down before I forget it.

Just to remind you (and also me, actually), I will list the major points about the course structure. I have two more-detailed posts here and here.

But here is the short version:

1. I taught the students the problem solving process, including some carefully-chosen heuristics (solve an easier problem first, find an invariant, etc). We spent most every Monday and Friday working on two new problems for students to solve (Wednesdays were quizzes or review). I (mostly) carefully chose these problems so that they could be solved by applying the heuristics we had already discussed.
2. If a student solved a problem, she could sign up to present the solution in class. If we all agreed it was correct, the problem was closed and no one else could get credit for it. If multiple people signed up to present the same problem on the same day, I would randomly select one person to present, while the other people handed in written solutions of the problem. Everyone with a correct solution got full credit for the problem.
3. Once a problem was presented correctly, it was eligible to go on a quiz. So the quizzes consisted entirely of problems students have already seen solutions to. Once a student gave a correct solution on a quiz, he never had to answer that question again.
4. Regardless of whether a student found a solution to a problem, the student could submit a Problem Report on that problem. The idea was to describe their problem solving process and mine out instances of good habits of mind to present as evidence for a higher grade (see this for more detail).
5. The grading scheme is basically this: a student got a C for the semester if she did well on the habits of mind in the Problem Reports; a student got a B for the semester if she additionally could reproduce solutions she had already seen (i.e. “did well on the quizzes”); a student got an A for the semester if she additionally could create solutions to problems she had never seen before (i.e. “correctly presented many of the problems from the course”).

Here are a couple of examples of problems I gave the students:

1. How many zeroes appear at the end of 100!, where 100! is the product all of the integers between 1 and 100 inclusive?
2. A dragon has 100 heads. A knight can cut off exactly 15, 17, 20 or 5 heads with one blow of his sword. In each of these cases, respectively 24, 2, 14, or 17 new heads grow on its shoulders. If all heads are cut off, the dragon dies. Can the dragon ever die?
3. What is the last digit in the following product? $(2^1)(2^2)(2^3)(2^4)\ldots(2^{201})(2^{202})(2^{203})$?
4. An enormous $5 \times 5$ checkerboard is painted on the floor and there is a student standing on each square. When the command is given each student moves to a square that is diagonally adjacent to their square. Then it is possible that some squares are empty and some squares have more than one student. Find the smallest number of empty squares.
5. Suppose you are in a strange part of the world where everyone either always tells the truth (a Truthie) or always lies (a Liar). Two inhabitants, A and B, are sitting together. A says, “Either I am a Liar or else B is a Truthie.” What can you conclude?

The last type of “Truthie/Liar” problem is a standard one in logic, and I started including a lot of them at the end of the semester. This was both because students really enjoyed them and the students needed a lot of help getting the Perspectives habit of mind. Students had a very difficult time figuring out what this even means, and I need to do a better job helping them understand it in future semesters.

One consequence of including so many Truthie/Liar questions is that I would like to add a heuristic to the class list: “Break the problem into cases.”

One other thing that I would change about the course is the quiz structure. What I did was to pull problems that had been previously solved by members of the class. Instead, I would like to find 15 or 20 problems, present them myself to help teach/emphasize/remind students about heuristics and the problem solving process, and use these on the quizzes. This would solve a couple of problems:

1. I had three sections, so I had to keep track of three sets of quiz questions. This way, I would only have one set.
2. This would give students more time to digest all of the solutions. As I did it, students may have only had two weeks to learn a solution that was presented toward the end of the semester. If I control the quiz questions, I could pace them so that the last one is solved for them by mid-semester, giving them at least half of a semester to learn the solutions for the quiz problems.
3. Similarly, I can raise the expectations for how many solutions they learn if they all have at least half of a semester to learn them. Depending on the problems I choose, I think that I could realistically expect a B-student to know all of the solutions.
4. Perhaps most importantly, some solutions are more instructive and valuable than others. I would be able to show them solutions that can be modified to solve other problems.

I would also change one detail of the Problem Reports. I required at least three in each category to be eligible for a C, six for a B, and nine for an A. I think that three was too low, so I would probably change it to 5 for a C, 5 for a B, and 10 for an A.

Finally, I spent too much of the class letting the students freely try to solve problems. I need to figure out how to incorporate more instruction into these. For instance, I could charge each team trying out an assigned heuristic on a problem, let them work, and then have the teams report how they worked to apply the heuristic. This would regularly review the heuristics and help the students get in the habit of using them (I think that most students did not consciously use them).

Does anyone else have any ideas about any of this—particularly concerning the previous paragraph?

February 28, 2014

I described my structure for my linear algebra class last week. This week, I will describe my grading system.

First, recall that this is typically a sophomore-level class (although 9 of my 16 students are first-years). It is typically the first mathematics course that a mathematics student takes after calculus II. The purpose is to learn about linear algebra—including abstract vector spaces—and gently introduce the students to proofs.

The grading system hinges on what I want the grades of $A$, $B$, and $C$ to mean. My linear algebra class does not vary from my usual interpretation: To get a $C$, you must demonstrate conceptual understanding of the material. To get a $B$, you must demonstrate both conceptual understanding and computational proficiency. To get an $A$, you must additionally demonstrate an ability to learn independently.

Below, I describe the graded portions of the class, followed by a set of rules that determines the semester grade for each student. I reserve the right to raise a student’s grade from what this rubric says, but I will never lower it. The rest of this post is taken directly from my syllabus (modulo some formatting and possible editorial comments); I would appreciate any thoughts that you have on how to improve this.

Here we go; it may be helpful to see my structuring if you have questions about anything.

Presentations

Each time you present a Presentation Problem, I will make a note of it. It is better to correctly do a problem than to incorrectly do a problem, and it is better to correctly do a difficult problem than it is to do a relatively easy problem. Both the quality and quantity of the Presentations you give will be considered in determining your semester grade.

Part of the goal of this class is to help you hone your mathematical judgment. Because of this, I will limit the number of presentations that I confirm are correct (I will confirm 2 per day for the first three classes, 1 per day for the enxt three classes, and then 5 for the entirety of the remaining part of the semester). Please note that I will still do something during the semester to correct any misconceptions the class has—I just won’t necessarily do it immediately following the presentation unless the majority of the class wants to spend a Confirmation.

Daily Homework

You will be expected to submit you work for the Routine Problems and Presentation Problems at the end of each Monday and Friday during the first half of the semester. These will be graded on completion: as long as you make an honest effort at solving every Routine and Presentation Problem due that day, you will receive full credit. You are not expected to use $\LaTeX$ for Daily Homework.

Since these are due at the end of the class, you may write on the homework with a marker (I will supply them, although I would appreciate it if any student brought his/her own). Your grade for Daily Homework will be based on the work you came to class with—the work in marker will not be graded.

Portfolio Homework

Each Monday and Friday during the first half of the semester, I will denote 1—2 of the Presentation Problems to be Portfolio Homework. This is homework that you are to write up nice solutions on $\LaTeX$.

Each problem will receive one of two grades: Complete or Resubmit. I will read your solution until I find an error. Once I find an error—it could be mathematical, grammatical, etc—I will mark it with Resubmit (or some suitable shorthand) and stop reading it. You can resubmit the same problem multiple times without penalty; if you eventually get a grade of Complete, you have been 100% successful on the problem, whether it was on your first attempt or your twenty-first.

You can only submit up to two Portfolio Homework problems per class day. This means that you should start working on them immediately—you do not want to have a lot of problems left to do during the last week of the semester, since you will not be able to submit all of them.

Mind Maps

You will be required to keep a “mind map” of all of the ideas described by the Chapter titles and Sub-Chapter titles in the table of contents of the course notes. Do this online using coggle.it, name it YOURNAME239MindMap, and share your work with me by using the “Share” button. You are to update this mind map weekly; I will check to make sure that it is up-to-date periodically, although I may not announce when I do so. (This is not in the syllabus: the whole point of the mind map is that I want students to start to intentionally make connections among the different topics..)

Quizzes
We will be having quizzes during the second half of the semester. Each question will be linked to a Learning Goal (and clearly labelled indicating which Goal it is attached to), and will be graded either as Acceptable (if there are no errors of any sort) or Not Acceptable (if an error exists).

You will need to get five problems correct for every Learning Goal to be considered to have successfully learned a particular Learning Goal. There will be a few Learning Goals (This is not in the syllabus: the topics are $LU$ and $QR$ factorization; the only time I am going to mention them at all in class is when I put them on the quiz. I will grade those quizzes, and perhaps answer some specific questions of students who come to office hours. But students really are expected to truly learn these topics on their own if they want an $A$.) that are not covered in class; these are only for students who are aiming to get an $A$ in the class, and they are meant to be learned on your own.

Calculators will not be allowed on quizzes. You should also not need them.

Submitting a Quiz can never hurt your grade; the worst it can do is to fail to help your grade. Because of this, the course policy is that make-up quizzes will not be given; you should plan on “making up” the quiz by doing well on later quizzes.

Examinations
The quizzes largely take the place of most examinations. We will, however, have a final exam. There will be two components: We will have an in-class final exam on Thursday, May 15th at 8:00 am. The location is our usual classroom. Also, there will be a take-home portion of the final exam will be assigned in the last week of classes to be handed in at the final exam.

For students who wish to get an $A$ for the semester, there will be a brief oral examination. You will receive the topic prior to the oral examination. This oral examination can only be done once you have at least 4 correct answers for each of the quiz Learning Goals (so this does not need to be done during Finals Week).

Project
You are encouraged, but not required to do a project for this course. These projects will be mini-research projects. Your job is to find a problem (I will provide some possible problems), try to solve the problem, create a poster for it, and be prepared to answer questions about the topic and poster. Toward the end of the semester, we will have a poster presentation session for the class. The poster presentation will likely occur on Scholarship and Creativity Day.

# Department ColloquiaPart of being a mathematician is to listen to mathematics. Because of this, you will be expected to attend some number of the Mathematics Colloquium, which occurs most every other Thursday at 2:40 pm (if you have a scheduling conflict, please let me know).GradingHere is how your semester grade will be determined:To get a $C$ for the semester, you must: You successfully answered at least one Query You presented (perhaps unsuccessfully) at least a few times You received credit on Daily Homework on all but at most three attempts You have grades of Acceptable on all but at most two Portfolio Homework problems You were successful on all of the Quiz Learning Goals in the Conceptual Learning Goal section You maintained a mostly complete and mostly up-to-date mind map for the entire semester You got at least a $CD$ on the final exam. To get a $B$ for the semester, you must: You successfully answered at least two Queries You many successful presentations You received credit on Daily Homework on all but at most two attempts You have grades of Acceptable on all Portfolio Homework problems You were successful on all of the Quiz Learning Goals in the Conceptual Learning Goal and Computation Learning Goal sections You maintained a complete and up-to-date mind map for the entire semester You attend at least 1 Mathematics Colloquium this semester You got at least a $BC$ on the final exam. To get a $A$ for the semester, you must: You successfully answered at least two Queries You many successful presentations of difficult problems You received credit on Daily Homework on all but at most two attempts You have grades of Acceptable on all Portfolio Homework problems You were successful on all of the Quiz Learning Goals You maintained a complete and up-to-date mind map for the entire semester You successfully complete an oral examination You successfully complete a project You attend at least 2 Mathematics Colloquia this semester You got at least a $AB$ on the final exam. I will also make a judgment call about the grades of $AB$, $BC$, $D$, and $F$.

## Linear Algebra Class Structure

February 21, 2014

I was originally scheduled to teach abstract algebra this semester, but my section was cancelled due to low enrollment. Instead, I am teaching linear algebra, as we had higher-than-expected enrollment there.

The good news is that I can use the same basic course structure for linear algebra that I was planning to use for abstract algebra. The model is this:

1. The semester is divided into two parts. The first part, from January 15th until March 31st, is where we learn the content. The second part is all review and assessment.
2. For the first part, we do IBL-type presentations on Mondays and Fridays. Each day, we can do 4–6 presentations in 55 minutes. On Wednesdays, we review what we learned on the previous Monday and Friday. The reason why I chose Wednesday as the review day was so that students could have at least three nights to prepare for each presentation day.
3. For the second half of the semester, we will alternate between assessment days and review days. Students will be able to choose what they want to review based on what they found most confusing from the first half of the semester AND from the recent assessments.

One advantage of having the Wednesdays saved for review is that I can use it for an emergency presentation day if a Monday or Friday class is cancelled; this has happened twice so far this semester, due to cold and snow (including today).

One problem that I have is that the course notes I wrote for linear algebra have 314 problems in them. Since I am compressing the presentation part into the first part of the semester AND only using Mondays and Fridays for presentations, I only have 20 presentations days for the 314 problems. This means that we need to average 16 problems per presentation day. I accomplish this by designating 6 problems as “Presentation Problems” (which will be presented, naturally), creating video solutions for another (roughly) 6 problems, and then leaving the remaining four-ish problems without solutions (these are mostly computational problems for which the students were given a video “template” on how to do the process).

It took a while to create the videos, but they are pretty much necessary for our course. This course serves as a very gentle “Introduction to Proofs” course, but the level of proof that is expected is of the “figure out how the proof follows directly from the definition” type. Since there are more complicated proofs that need to be done in the course, I would either need to lecture in class, have the students read the proofs from a textbook (which we don’t have), or create video lectures.

Also, given that we only have six Presentation Problems each day, I have developed a method of having the students volunteer for the problems that cuts down on the amount of work that I have assigning students to problems. My usual way of doing this is putting one essay quiz on Moodle that asks “Which problems would you like to present?” I still do this for my capstone course, in which we present 15 problems per day. For linear algebra, though, I put one quiz consisting of one multiple choice question for each problem that is to be presented. The students are given three choices: “I want to present this problem,” “I really want to present this problem,” and “I changed my mind—I no longer wish to present this problem” (a student who does not want to present does not need to complete the quiz for that particular question). I assign each question 10 points, 5 points, and 0 points, respectively. These points do not affect a student’s grade, but a there simply so I can look at the quiz summary to see each student’s preference quickly without much clicking. The drawback to this is that there is a lot more to do on Moodle (6 quizzes per day instead just one). However, I created all of the quizzes at the very beginning of the semester, and it didn’t actually take that long to do once I learned about the “duplicate” feature on Moodle.

We are just over halfway through the presentation days, and the class is going really well. I think that I have a remarkably good class, so I cannot really say how this class structure is working; I think that any class structure would work with this particular group of students. On the other hand, this shows that this class structure can work, given the right set of students.

## Team Quizzes

February 14, 2014

Inspired by Eric Mazur (h/t Robert Talbert [Edit 2/15/2014: I also meant to credit Joss Ives, who intially planted this idea in my head a couple of years ago]), I decided to try team quizzes in my linear algebra class. Here is basically how it went:

The topic was “Subspaces.” I gave students 10 minutes to answer four multiple choice questions. Each of the four questions is about a subset $W$ of $\mathbb{R}^4$. The students need to answer questions about the following four subsets:

1. $W=\{(a,b,c,d) \in \mathbb{R}^4 : abcd \geq 0\}$
2. $W=\{(a,b,c,d) \in \mathbb{R}^4 : b=1\}$
3. $W=\{(a,b,c,d) \in \mathbb{R}^4 : b$ is twice the sum of $c+d\}$
4. $W=\{(a,b,c,d) \in \mathbb{R}^4 : a+b > c+d\}$

For each subset, students had to pick the best answer from the following list:

1. $W$ is a subspace.
2. $W$ is not a subspace, and the only one of the three axioms that fails is “$W$ contains the zero element.”
3. $W$ is not a subspace, and the only one of the three axioms that fails is “$W$ is closed under addition.”
4. $W$ is not a subspace, and the only one of the three axioms that fails is “$W$ is closed under scalar multiplication.”
5. $W$ is not a subspace, and the only one of the three axioms that holds is “$W$ contains the zero element.”
6. $W$ is not a subspace, and the only one of the three axioms that holds is “$W$ is closed under addition.”
7. $W$ is not a subspace, and the only one of the three axioms that holds is “$W$ is closed under scalar multiplication.”
8. $W$ is not a subspace, and none of the three axioms holds.

The students wrote their answers (just their choice, not an explanation) on two copies of the quiz. After the 10 minutes of individual work, students handed one of the copies of their answers to me and got in teams of four. The four students then repeated the same quiz collaboratively. I did this by putting the quiz on Moodle. Teams could keep answering until they got the right answer, although there is a penalty for each incorrect attempt.

For this quiz, a student received SBG credit for one “Linear Spaces and Subspaces” question if the student answered only one question incorrectly total between the individual and the team quiz. So a student who did perfectly on the individual quiz could have their team answer one questions incorrectly, a student who missed exactly one question on the individual quiz had to have a perfect team quiz score, and a student who missed two questions on the individual quiz did not receive credit.

Aside from the fact that I did not give the students enough time (alternatively, I gave the students too many questions), student reviews ranged from “this was good” to “this is freakin’ awesome.” No student said they did not like, and about a quarter of the class seemed desperate for more team quizzes.

It was a tiny bit tricky setting this up on Moodle. I probably forgot some details, but here are some things that I needed to do to get it to work:

1. Make a regular Moodle quiz. This means that I had to create four separate questions, and then put all four questions on the quiz.
2. Change “How quiz behaves” to “Adaptive mode.” This allows students to attempt the same question multiple times.
3. Uncheck the box “Right Answer” under “Review Options” so that students are not shown the correct answer after each attempt (the second attempt becomes really easy if you were just told the answer).
4. In each question, I think that I had to assign a penalty (0.1 works fine) to let me know how many attempts each team took. I think that I also changed from the default so that the answers were not shuffled.

I am going to try this again, but not until I finish the course content at the end of March (I race through the content so that I can have 1.5 months of review and assessment). This would be great to do for the entire class period, but I do not see how I can make it work reasonably well in less than 45 minutes (cutting back on the number of questions decreases the confidence that I have that a student understands, and also does not allow for students who do well on the individual portion to have a cushion on the team portion).

But this worked really well, and I am looking forward to building it into my courses next year.

## Chromebooks, Videos, and Group Quizzes

February 12, 2014

We are four weeks into the semester at this point, and I am hoping to come out of the early semester sprint to prepare for the entire semester. This will happen by the end of the week, and may happen as early as tomorrow. Mainly, I need to finish creating video solutions for the quizzes for the entire semester; I may also write the weekly clicker questions for the remainder of the semester, but I may intentionally decide to do those week-by-week.

Here are some random things that are too short for their own entry:

• I am starting to schedule research time into my schedule now. This is part of a larger effort to schedule time blocks into my semester. First up: re-write a paper on SBG to resubmit to a journal.
• I recently got a Chromebook. This has saved me a ton of time already. I bring it to my classes that feature student presentations, and it allows me to put my notes directly into the computer. I underestimated how much time this took, and I appreciate having this time back now (any laptop would have helped here, but my Chromebook is a great combination of affordable and compact).
• I am doing a new type of group quiz for the first time tomorrow in linear algebra. I am going to give the students four multiple choice questions. First, students answer individually the four questions and submit their answers to me. Then students get in teams of four to answer the questions as a team on our Moodle. Each team my keep answering problems on Moodle as many times as they like, although answering incorrectly counts against you. Students get credit if they get at most one problem wrong in both the individual and team portions (so if a student gets all four correct on the individual portion, they get a second try at a problem if their team gets an answer wrong).
• There is good stuff on SBG at Kate Owens’s blog and Evelyn Lamb’s post on the Blog on Math Blogs blog (the last bit may include some self-promotion).

Once I am reasonably prepared for the rest of the semester, I think that I will try blogging more regularly again. I just really like having a huge head start on the semester.

## The Joy of Text . . .files

January 22, 2014

It is the beginning of the semester, and I have never been this prepared before.  This is a combination of preparing for the spring semester during the summer, preparing a bit during the fall semester, and being very efficient in my 7 days of work before the semester.  Here are a few of things that I am very happy about:

1. I have started trying to document everything in simple text files.  Up until now, I have been simply using pieces of scratch paper to jot things down on for my tickler file.  However I inevitably end up recycling these sheets of paper, which means that I have to start many things from scratch each semester.  In particular, I created a long list of things that I need to do to begin the semester.  I now have that in a text file so that I can refer to it in later semesters; I suspect that this will pay off big.  Here is my planning list for Spring 2014 (an XX means that I am done).

2. I took backward design seriously this semester; I wrote out all of my exams and quizzes before the semester started.  This means that I will have to spend very little time creating and tweaking them during the semester.  And on a related note. . .

3. . . .I have been “batching” things as much as I possibly can.  It takes me a lot less time to write all of the quiz questions on a particular topic for the semester if I do it in one sitting versus if I do it in 20 sittings, if only due to “start up costs.”  Moreover, I feel better about the quality of my assessments, as I can make sure that I only duplicate assessment when I want to.  Finally, it helps me to have a good feel for what the course “feels” like.  Another example of “batching” is creating my Moodle (CMS) pages; by creating all of the assignments/quizzes/etc at once, I think that I save a lot of time (especially after I found out that there is a “Duplicate” function for items on Moodle).

So things are looking good.  The main thing that I have left to do is to create a lot of videos and create a reasonable amount of clicker questions.

## 2013 in review

December 31, 2013

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 7,600 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

## Again, a new IBL-Peer Instruction Hybrid Model

December 24, 2013

I am continuing to try to figure out a way to effectively use both IBL and Peer Instruction (“clickers”) in my classes.

First, my main constraint: my favorite grading scheme requires students to be given many chances to get questions correct. Ideally, this means that we would finish with new content for the course 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the semester.

Here is the approach I have been using up until now:

1. First part of the semester: Students get the content from reading the textbook.
2. First part of the semester: Students assimilate the content through Peer Instruction.
3. Second part of the semester: Students do something that resembles (but isn’t actually) IBL.
4. Second part of semester: Assess the students a lot.

Below is the same model I discussed last summer for my abstract algebra class. That abstract algebra class was closed due to low enrollment, and I was assigned linear algebra instead. I am keeping the same model, although I have a lot more exercises/theorems/conjectures in my linear algebra notes than I do for my abstract algebra notes.

Here is the new approach:

1. Mondays and Fridays during first part of the semester: Use IBL and student presentations to introduce the content.
2. Wednesdays during first part of the semester: use Peer Instruction to review and solidify ideas learned on the previous Friday and Monday.
3. Second part of the semester: We review the most difficult material through Peer Instruction and in-class practice.
4. Second part of semester: Assess the students a lot.

Here is the main problem that I am facing: I have 312 exercises in my IBL notes; I basically wrote the notes that I wanted—including many examples to build intuition—and I am now trying to figure out how to shoehorn all of the content into 1/2 to 2/3 of a semester. This works out to an average of about 7 exercises per day if we did IBL work every day of the entire semester, 10 exercises per day if we did IBL work on Mondays and Fridays (and review on Wednesdays) every day of the semester, and 20 exercises per day if we did IBL work on Mondays and Fridays (and review on Wednesdays) every day for half the semester. So I want to see if I can do between 10 to 20 exercises per class IBL class period, which is too much to do without some modifications. Here are the options I can think of to make this happen:

1. Cut some of the content. I don’t want to do this.
2. Provide screencasts of some of the exercises. I want to do this anyway, since part of the goal of our linear algebra class is to introduce students to proofs, and I believe that it is very useful for students to see worked examples. But I don’t want to have to provide 10–15 screencasts each class period.
3. Simply do not cover many of the intuition-building exercises in class; Dana Ernst suggested this to me yesterday, and I think that it is brilliant. There is not reason why I have to do everything in class. Perhaps I could just take questions on any intuition-building exercises after we do the main theorems; I could provide screencasts for some of these if we run out of time.
4. Other ideas?

Right now, my plan is to have students present and thoroughly discuss roughly 5 problems per IBL day, I would do screencasts for roughly 5 problems per day, leaving roughly 10 intuition problems to leave for the students to do.

Do any of you have ideas about how to improve this?

## Screencasting in Linux

December 10, 2013

I just got myself set up to do screencasting on my Linux machine. I use Fedora, and it was not too bad. I just want to record my set-up and recording process so that I don’t forget anything.

First, I would like to thank my Linux administrator for helping me (he is awesome), and I would like to thank Vincent Knight and Andrew Stacey for giving me the outline and encouraging me.

To set up, I had my linux administrator install recordMyDesktop (I tried to do this, but I either don’t have permission or I don’t know how to do it properly. Or maybe both). But initially, the video would freeze, creating a lag between my voice and the screen. I was able to fix this by using this solution.

But it all works now. Here is my process:

To record:

1. Open gtk-recordmydesktop.
2. Open MyPaint.
3. Use my Wacom Bamboo tablet to write in MyPaint.
4. Record the screencast with recordMyDesktop.
5. This records in ogv format, which does not play well with YouTube. To convert to avi, I type the following into the command line: ffmpeg -i foo.ogv foo.avi

I welcome feedback on how to improve this process. In particular, I am not certain that .avi files are the best to upload to YouTube.

## Chromebook!

November 26, 2013

I live on a Windows campus. I came from a Mac campus, and I really wanted a Mac, but I was unable to get one. Rather than get a Windows machine, I opted for a Linux machine. I am not really a member of the Linux community (I don’t have the skills to belong), but I have been really happy with my machine. The main drawback is that it is not portable; there are many times that I wish I had a laptop.

In fact, portability actually makes me more productive. I work at a very social campus (both students and faculty), which is nice exactly up until the point where you need to get a lot of work done. If I had a laptop, I could leave my office to work at a place where no one can find me.

I briefly considered last year switching from my Linux machine to a Windows laptop. This would be portable, and it would also make it easier to create screencasts. However, I am loathe to give up the dual monitors that come with my Linux machine, which seem to triple my production.

I would consider buying a MacBook, but I do not have a lot of money available to me. So, instead, I bought a Chromebook. It was used, it was $160, and does 95% of what I want a computer to do (even though it is basically just a web browser). In order to save money, I opted for an old Samsung from Amazon Marketplace, rather than the newest version. I am very happy with my purchase so far. The reason for this—and I wouldn’t have bought a Chromebook if this hadn’t happened—is that William Stein and friend created a ridiculously useful service that allows me to create $\LaTeX$ documents online, do all of my calculations online, and gives me a fully functional shell with which I can ssh into my work computer. Without Sage Math Cloud, I would not have gotten a Chromebook. With it, I get all of the benefits of dual monitors and portability for only$160.

(I have received nothing from Google, Samsung, or the Sage Project for writing this post).