The Question Mark Method

Teaching anything is never an easy process. Keeping things simple is possibly the best way to go about it. After all, if you can't explain something simply, then you don't know it well yourself. This booklet is my simple method of approaching teaching, learning, planning and assessing. This is the method which made my most complicated tasks doable, helped my quietest learners talk, my non-writing learners write, and my overwhelmed teacher trainees focus and grow. The method is applicable to any area of education, and examples are provided from my work experience. There are planning examples, as well as learning games.

A guide to Ruby programming covers such topics as datatypes and objects, expressions, classes and modules, control structures, and the Ruby platform.

Written for the one- to three-term introductory programming course, the sixth edition of Java Illuminated provides learners with an interactive, user-friendly approach to learning the Java programming language. Comprehensive but accessible, the text takes a progressive approach to object-oriented programming, allowing students to build on established skills to develop new and increasingly complex classes. Java Illuminated follows an activity-based active learning approach that ensures student engagement and interest. In addition, the text presents other topics of interest, including graphical user interfaces (GUI), data structures, file input and output, and graphical applications.

There may be no better way to learn how to program than by dissecting real, representative examples written in your language of choice. Ruby by Example analyzes a series of Ruby scripts, examining how the code works, explaining the concepts it illustrates, and showing how to modify it to suit your needs. Baird's examples demonstrate key features of the language (such as inheritance, encapsulation, higher-order functions, and recursion), while simultaneously solving difficult problems (such as validating XML, creating a bilingual program, and creating command-line interfaces). Each chapter builds upon the previous, and each key concept is highlighted in the margin to make it easier for you to navigate the book. You'll learn how to: –Use the interactive Ruby shell (irb) to learn key features of the language –Extend Ruby using RubyGems, the Ruby package manager –Create numerical utilities, as well as utilities that process and analyze HTML/XML –Implement purely functional and metaprogramming techniques to save time and effort –Optimize, profile, and test your code to make sure that it not only does its job, but does it well –Create web applications using Rails Ruby is the fastest growing programming language today, and for good reason: its elegant syntax and readable code make for prolific and happy programmers. But it can be difficult to understand and implement without a little help. Ruby by Example shows you how to take advantage of Ruby as you explore Ruby's fundamental concepts in action.

This book constitutes a practical guide to the important skills of both theorizing and writing in social scientific scholarship, focusing on the importance of identifying relations between concepts that are useful for explaining social entities and of producing a text that convincingly advances the theory that has been constructed. Taking as its point of departure the distinction between the research process and the reporting process – between clarifying one’s ideas to oneself and writing to express these ideas clearly to others – this volume concentrates on writing when theorizing as a way of thinking, emphasizing the series of relations that exist between ontology, epistemology and rhetoric upon which successful theoretical writing depends. Richly illustrated with practical examples, the book is divided into two parts, the first of which presents techniques for theorizing based upon visualized and logical connections of ideas, concepts and empirical patterns in both free and systematic ways, and the second part providing techniques for structuring and presenting arguments in essays, papers, articles or books.As such, Methods for Social Theory offers a toolbox for the development and presentation of social thought, which will prove essential for students and teachers across the social sciences.

While teaching the Numerical Methods for Engineers course over the last 15 years, the author found a need for a new textbook, one that was less elementary, provided applications and problems better suited for chemical engineers, and contained instruction in Visual Basic® for Applications (VBA). This led to six years of developing teaching notes that have been enhanced to create the current textbook, Numerical Methods for Chemical Engineers Using Excel®, VBA, and MATLAB®. Focusing on Excel gives the advantage of it being generally available, since it is present on every computer—PC and Mac—that has Microsoft Office installed. The VBA programming environment comes with Excel and greatly enhances the capabilities of Excel spreadsheets. While there is no perfect programming system, teaching this combination offers knowledge in a widely available program that is commonly used (Excel) as well as a popular academic software package (MATLAB). Chapters cover nonlinear equations, Visual Basic, linear algebra, ordinary differential equations, regression analysis, partial differential equations, and mathematical programming methods. Each chapter contains examples that show in detail how a particular numerical method or programming methodology can be implemented in Excel and/or VBA (or MATLAB in chapter 10). Most of the examples and problems presented in the text are related to chemical and biomolecular engineering and cover a broad range of application areas including thermodynamics, fluid flow, heat transfer, mass transfer, reaction kinetics, reactor design, process design, and process control. The chapters feature "Did You Know" boxes, used to remind readers of Excel features. They also contain end-of-chapter exercises, with solutions provided.

Based on the author’s introductory course at the University of Oregon, Explorations in Computing: An Introduction to Computer Science focuses on the fundamental idea of computation and offers insight into how computation is used to solve a variety of interesting and important real-world problems. Taking an active learning approach, the text encourages students to explore computing ideas by running programs and testing them on different inputs. It also features illustrations by Phil Foglio, winner of the 2009 and 2010 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Novel. Classroom-Tested Material The first four chapters introduce key concepts, such as algorithms and scalability, and hone practical lab skills for creating and using objects. In the remaining chapters, the author covers "divide and conquer" as a problem solving strategy, the role of data structures, issues related to encoding data, computer architecture, random numbers, challenges for natural language processing, computer simulation, and genetic algorithms. Through a series of interactive projects in each chapter, students can experiment with one or more algorithms that illustrate the main topic. Requiring no prior experience with programming, these projects show students how algorithms provide computational solutions to real-world problems. Web Resource The book’s website at www.cs.uoregon.edu/eic presents numerous ancillaries. The lab manual offers step-by-step instructions for installing Ruby and the RubyLabs gem with Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Linux. The manual includes tips for editing programs and running commands in a terminal emulator. The site also provides online documentation of all the modules in the RubyLabs gem. Once the gem is installed, the documentation can be read locally by a web browser. After working through the in-depth examples in this textbook, students will gain a better overall understanding of what computer science is about and how computer scientists think about problems.