Math 122 - Calculus for Biology II
Fall Semester, 2000
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San Diego State University -- This page last updated 03-Sep-00

Additional Help - Lab 1

There have a collection of questions and problems that have appeared, since you started the first Lab. I am adding this page to help you with some additional advice to help you with your first Lab. There will probably be additional information added to this page as the week progresses, so you may want to check back here to see if it helps answer some of your questions.

  1. Many of you are unfamiliar with the Discrete Dynamical Systems material, so I am providing you with a collection of references that should help guide your reading of Math 121 notes.
    1. Understanding the iteration procedure for updating functions.
    2. Finding equilibria. (Logistic, Ricker's Model, Hassell's Model)
    3. Determining the stability of equilibria.(Ricker's Model and Hassell's Model)
  2. There are a couple good sources to the types of graphs you should be producing for Questions 2 and 3 in the Lab. One excellent source it to examine the Question and Solution from the Lab Final of last semester and the other good source would be either analyses in either the product rule or chain rule sections of the Math 121 notes.
  3. The students in the Thursday Lab had a defective copy of the Help Page handed out (though the lecture corrected the problem). The help on Question 2 had the wrong formula for entering in D2. You should use the corrected version in the revised help page.
  4. One way that students found to make good Lab reports was to copy their Lab from the web into a Word document, then revise it with answers to the solutions filled in between the questions. This helps assure you answer all parts of the questions.
  5. Several students wondered how to put Maple graphs into their Word documents. In the BA-120 Computer Lab, you are using the outdated Maple V Release 4. After you create a graph in this version of Maple, you highlight the graph (including at least the line above the graph and the line below the graph for some unknown reason), then you use Copy under the Edit command line. You next go to your Word document and you use the Paste Special line under the Edit command line and choose the option bitmap. The graph should appear. Double clicking on the graph allows some editing, but you may just prefer to write a paragraph to explain what you observe in the graph, such as which function is which.
  6. It appears that there are still some difficulties saving Word documents to the A: Drive on the Thin Client machines. You can still save on the H: (shazam) Drive or the C: Temp folder, then you can either move that file to the A: Drive (your floppy disk) or pick it up on the A: Drive from one of the other computers.
  7. Several students have had difficulty understanding how to graph updating functions. To graph an updating function, you begin by determining the domain on which you want to graph. (Recall in class, we said that for Question #2 the domain was 0 to 1.) Then you can use the graphing template in Excel or create a graph of your own in Excel by dividing the domain into roughly 50 equally spaced subintervals. You apply the updating function to those entries in the domain. (You also want to include the line with Pn+1 = Pn, the identity map, which can be graphed many ways, as it is a straight line, which really only needs 2 points.)

Hopefully, these additional hints will make it easier to finish this first lab and guide you to studying key parts of the Math 121 course.