October 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 5
October 1996 € Volume 23 € Number 5
One of the more unusual aspects of this summer's IFORS meeting in Vancouver, B.C. &emdash; and one of special interest to teachers &emdash; was a series of sessions called "Innovative Approaches to Teaching Management Science." I organized this track (at the urging of Andres Weintraub) in order to bring together in one place, and for an international audience of MS/OR professionals, some of the teaching innovators I have known and learned from over the last couple of years. A number of us have been offering short papers on teaching at professional meetings but have not had the opportunity to discuss our ideas in depth. More particularly, we have not had the time in the typical meeting format to demonstrate some of the experiential or active learning approaches we have employed in our teaching. Our idea this time was to devote a full 90-minute session to a single topic and a single speaker and, to the maximum extent possible, to involve the participants in our methods by having them actually experience them.
The line-up consisted of Sam Savage on spreadsheets, Judith Liebman on cooperative learning, Peter Bell and Christoph Haehling von Lanzenaeur on case teaching, myself on teaching modeling, and Val Belton and Helyn Thornbury on the multimedia project MENTOR.
Following are my impressions of the high points of each of these
sessions. If you are interested in learning more about any of the
topics or speakers, I have provided e-mail and Web addresses where
possible. If you are interested in issues surrounding the teaching of
MS/OR and are not already a member, by all means join INFORMED, the
INFORMS Forum on Education
(www.ualberta.ca/~informed/).
Innovative Use of Spreadsheets in Teaching
Sam Savage, Stanford University
e-mail:
[email protected]