Thread by @bjbalas

Another 🧵 about what I'm doing this week in S&P at @NDSU. One goal for Week #1 is to begin re-introducing students to the math they'll need for the course. This is tough going - many of them will have taken no math at all since freshman year, save for our methods seq. <1/n>

As a group, they aren't confident in their quantitative skills. My first "quiz" is always to ask what the most advanced class is that they've taken and how they'd rate their confidence in their quantitative skills. This usually ends up between 1-2 on a 1-5 scale. <2/n>

What do I want them to be able to do? My class is largely an exercise in how vision would work if everything was linear (though non-linear operations sneak in later). This means I can really introduce a few key concepts that go a long way. <3/n>

First, I need them to get what a matrix is. That means understanding arrays and vectors. The latter includes being able to think about vectors geometrically in terms of xy and magnitude/angle representations. We'll need this for population coding in particular. <4/n>

Second (and related to vectors), I want them to know how to compute a dot product. This operation lets you cover a lot of simple models of early vision with the same trick and it's not that scary! <5/n>

Finally, we need a trigonometry refresher. This is mostly about reminding them of SOHCAHTOA (or introducing it), but they'll usually need to hear about Pythagoras and the Euclidean distance formula, too. <6/n>

Something I learned the hard way: You NEED to cover how trig functions look and work on a calculator, esp. the diff. btw radians and degrees, how to tell what your calculator is using, and how to convert to what you want. <7/n>

So what's the homework? Practice on all of these. Calculate some dot products. Report some trig functions and some inverse trig functions. Calculate distances. Also, plug values into a formula to find an unknown. Fairly boring, but necessary for what's coming up. <8/n>

The real work for me is making sure students don't start to feel dumb and tune out right away. I emphasize that I expect them to be rusty and that the practice is there to shake that off. No question is stupid and I'm expecting them to try, not to know everything on Day 1. <9/n>

And that's pretty much it! If I feel ambitious, I may say a bit soon about how grading will work this term. I'm trying something new, so I'll be reporting how it goes as I find out what's good and bad about this approach. <end>

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