Decision Mathematics - Bob Francis

Bob spent some time introducing Decision Maths as the audience was mixed between those who already teach Decision and those who had yet to have that pleasure. Bob encouraged us to allow students to “invent” some of the algorithms for themselves by posing a simple version of the problem and thinking what you would have to do to get a computer to do a version that had 100 times as many data items. He showed how, for most problems, students can start by coming up with their own methods and then be encouraged to share those methods with each other and to discuss using questions such as “does it always work?”, “what if the problem was 10x or 100x bigger?”. In this way they would naturally find the need to formalise what they and others are doing – that is to write down an “algorithm” and measure “how long it takes”.

It would have been worth coming to the conference just to see demonstrated and get copies of the spreadsheets which Bob has devised. For example, the bubble sort one allows students to see exactly what is happening at each pass without messing about with bits of card or writing endless lists. At the end there is still a record of each pass so students who are not sure what is going on can re-examine the process. He told us that these materials are available to colleges who register as Further Mathematics centres, even if they do not then use the tutoring service. As someone who will be teaching this module for the first time next year, I found the session invaluable.

Finally we looked at how computers can help in a variety of Decision topics and were able to use Bob’s excellent Excel files for comparing different sorting methods; Autograph to solve Linear programming problems and lots more.