Global Warming and Groundwater Modules by Victor Padron

Engaging Mathematics partner Victor Padron of Normandale Community College recently participated in the workshop Teaching Geoscience with MATLAB, hosted by Carleton College in Northfield, MN.

Victor reports that his experience in the workshop was very interesting and motivating. He developed two teaching modules for this workshop that are available to the public through a web repository of educational resources sponsored by the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College.

Here are the names of his modules with the corresponding links and summaries:

Global Warming, A Zonal Energy Balance Model

Summary:

This is a teaching module, directed to undergraduate students in applied mathematics, introducing a Zonal Energy Balance Model to describe the evolution of the latitudinal distribution of Earth’s surface temperature subject to incremental levels of cumulative carbon emissions in the atmosphere. A strategy to avert “dangerous levels” of global warming is imbedded in the model. Students working with the module will write a MATLAB script to solve the model numerically and apply it with their own choice of the relevant parameters to obtain the solution that guarantee controlled levels of global warming.

Summary:

This is a teaching module presenting an introduction to modeling ground water pollution, directed to undergraduate students in applied mathematics. It begins with a brief discussion of Darcy’s law concerning the flow of a fluid through a porous medium. A mathematical model that uses field data to track ground-water contamination is presented. Students working with the module will write a MATLAB script to obtain a numerical solution of the model and apply it to investigate a real event of groundwater pollution.
Photo credit: Gerard Van der Leun (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
World Temperatures by Anders Sandberg (CC BY 2.0)

Engaging Mathematics Partner to Participate in Teaching Geoscience with MATLAB Workshop

Engaging Mathematics partner Victor Padron of Normandale Community College will be participating in the workshop Teaching Geoscience with MATLAB, hosted by Carleton College in Northfield, MN from October 18-20, 2015.

The workshop is designed to explore how teaching with MATLAB (a high-level technical computing language used by engineers, scientists, and mathematicians) can enhance the student learning environment in undergraduate Earth Science and related courses. MATLAB can be applied to solving problems and developing systems involving mathematical computation, data analytics and statistics, signal and image processing, geographical mapping, and more in the scientific and engineering domains. Workshop participants will help build a collection of teaching activities that showcase the utilization of MATLAB in the classroom.

Victor will be a panelist in a discussion on using MATLAB and data with students. He will present two modules based on versions of his Engaging Mathematics curricula on groundwater and global warming. Both require a computational environment such as MATLAB. The activities produced by the workshop participants will be posted on the workshop website and featured in a new web-based collection devoted to teaching geoscience with MATLAB. Links to these materials will be shared when they are made available. To learn more, visit the workshop website.

Photo credit: Anders Sandberg (CC BY 2.0)