{"id":1192,"date":"2017-08-22T12:03:08","date_gmt":"2017-08-22T12:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/?p=1192"},"modified":"2017-08-22T12:03:08","modified_gmt":"2017-08-22T12:03:08","slug":"material-for-students-making-the-transition-to-university","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/blog\/2017\/08\/material-for-students-making-the-transition-to-university\/","title":{"rendered":"Material for students making the transition to university"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This Summer we’ve supervised a group of student interns creating a bank of Numbas questions to support students making the transition from school to university. The genus of the project was the realisation that many degree courses around the university require a level of mathematical ability that students don’t expect when they apply, and might have lost in the years since GCSE. We aimed to create a bank of practice material that students can be directed to, following diagnostic tests or visits to our maths support service at the start of the academic year.<\/p>\n

Bradley, Lauren, Stanislav, Aiden, Elliott and Hannah have done a sterling job, creating over 150 questions in six weeks, covering topics mainly at the English GCSE level (exams taken at age 16, and many students’ last encounter with formal maths).<\/p>\n

Before beginning the project, we surveyed a few lecturers to find out what topics they believe many of their students need help with. We used this information to draw up a list of topics for our interns to cover, and cross-referenced it against the GCSE maths syllabus.<\/p>\n

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The students used Post-It notes to keep track of who was assigned to each topic. We never worked out what the columns were for!<\/p><\/div>\n

Both staff and students learned a lot from this project. It was valuable to observe a group of people, with no prior experience, learning to use the Numbas editor; we made a lot of notes about how we can improve the documentation and the editor interface. We’re aiming to prepare a paper describing our experiences, with input from the students as well as our own thoughts.<\/p>\n

The material is collected in a “Transition to university” project on the numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk editor<\/a>, and is all available under a permissive Creative Commons Attribution license, like everything else we release.<\/p>\n

It quickly became apparent that organising the questions in a way that would be useful to others required more careful thought than coming up with tags on our own. I spent a day adding the math<\/strong>centre taxonomy<\/a> into the editor, to give us a structure on which we can pin the content. Each question is now tagged using the math<\/strong>centre taxonomy – for example, we have 8 questions to do with the metric system<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We’ve packaged the questions up into exams<\/a>, each containing a few questions on a related topic. When collecting together material for your own use, you might want to start with one of our exams and supplement it with questions from elsewhere in the numbas.mathcentre.ac.uk<\/a> database.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This Summer we’ve supervised a group of student interns creating a bank of Numbas questions to support students making the transition from school to university. The genus of the project was the realisation that many degree courses around the university require a level of mathematical ability that students don’t expect when they apply, and might […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1211,"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.numbas.org.uk\/theme-testing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}