The ‘Conference Review: Kickoff Workshop for Project MOSAIC’ article from the 2011-1 issue.
Project MOSAIC (http://www.mosaic-web.org) is a community of educators working to develop new ways of introducing modeling, statistics, computation and calculus to students in colleges and universities. The Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota hosted the kickoff workshop for Project MOSAIC from June 30–July 2, 2010.
The MOSAIC community helps educators share ideas and resources that will improve undergraduate teaching, and to develop a curricular and assessment infrastructure to support the dissemination and evaluation of these ideas and resources. Other goals of this NSF-funded project (0920350) are to develop important skills in students of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics that will be needed for their professional careers, with a particular focus on the integration of capacities in four main areas:
The ability to create useful and informative representations of real-world situations.
The analysis of variability that draws on our ability to quantify uncertainty and to draw logical inferences from observations and experiments.
The capacity to think algorithmically, to manage data on large scales, to visualize and interact with models, and to automate tasks for efficiency, accuracy, and reproducibility.
The traditional mathematical entry point for college and university students and a subject that still has the potential to provide important insights to today’s students.
The workshop, which spanned three days, provided an opportunity for educators to present curricular innovations that have already been developed, to discuss the overall organization of curricula that will effectively unify the four areas outlined above, and to establish strategic plans for Project MOSAIC. More than 30 people from nearly as many institutions attended.
R was featured as a computational environment for many of the presentations. These included examples of the use of R for teaching calculus (Danny Kaplan, Macalester College), resampling in the introductory statistics course (Nathan Tintle, Hope College), computer languages to support MOSAIC instruction (Randall Pruim, Calvin College), stock market simulation to better understand variability (Nicholas Horton, Smith College), statistical modeling for poets (Vittorio Addona, Macalester College), reproducible analysis (Nicholas Horton, Smith College) and the cost of information (Danny Kaplan, Macalester College)
Since the workshop, the project organizers have been scheduling M-Casts. These 20-minute webinars broadcast over the Internet on the 2nd, 4th, and 5th Friday of each month are designed to provide a quick and easy way for educators to share ideas, to get reactions from others, and to form collaborations. Recent R-related M-Casts include discussion of new differentiation and anti-differentiation operators in R for calculus, and using simulation in R to teach the logic of hypothesis tests. Future M-Casts are planned to encourage additional use of R as an environment for computation within mathematics, science, statistics and modeling courses.
To further promote and facilitate the use of R in these efforts, Project MOSAIC has developed the mosaic package, which is now available on CRAN. It includes a number of datasets and functions which work to clarify and simplify integration of computing and modeling in introductory and intermediate statistics courses. This package was used extensively as part of the May 2011 Project MOSAIC USCOTS (United States Conference on Teaching Statistics) pre-conference workshop on using R to teach statistics. A low-volume discussion list (r-users@mosaic-web.org) has been created. For more information or to subscribe, see the URL at http://mailman-mail5.webfaction.com/listinfo/r-users.
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For attribution, please cite this work as
Horton, et al., "Conference Review: Kickoff Workshop for Project MOSAIC", The R Journal, 2011
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2011-1-mosaic,
author = {Horton, Nicholas J. and Pruim, Randall and Kaplan, Danny},
title = {Conference Review: Kickoff Workshop for Project MOSAIC},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2011},
note = {https://rjournal.github.io/},
volume = {3},
issue = {1},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {78-78}
}