UBC  ATSC 201 - Meteorology of Storms

News & Tips

Contents: News, Tips .

==> Note: Announcements and other News will be posted in Canvas.

News (most recent is at top of list)

Welcome to ATSC 201.    You will need the following materials/equipment.

  1. Every day in class we will use the iClicker (software access via your smartphone/pad/laptop), which allows you to respond during class, giving instant feedback to you and to the instructor.  You will need to bring your smartphone/pad/laptop to class EVERY class day -- it counts for marks.

  2. The textbook for this course is FREE, online.   https://www.eoas.ubc.ca/books/Practical_Meteorology/  . 

  3. The TA, Markers, and I will provide optional tutorials during the second week of term on how to use Excel for science.   We will try to schedule a few times for this tutorial, to reach as many of you as possible.  All the tutorials on this Doodle poll cover the same stuff, so you can attend any one of them.  If you would like to participate in an Excel tutorial, please use the Doodle poll here to indicate ALL the times that you could attend.

For other "News" items, please log onto the UBC  Canvas learning management system, using your Campus Wide Login (CWL).

What ATSC 201 students had to say about iClickers and Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) during a CBC TV interview in Nov 2009: ATSC 201 JiTT . 

Tips:

Tips for All Assignments: Be sure to check the course web page frequently for the most up-to-date list of Assignments.

Tips on Class Notes: The "textbook" is based on my lecture notes.  Many students bring only the chapters of interest to class every day, and leave most of the other chapters at home, so they don't carry so much weight in their packs.

Tips for Exams: The exams are open book, open notes, open calculator, etc. So don't memorize equations. The point is to know which equations apply to which situations, the physical interpretation of the terms in the eq, and to have some experience on how to solve the equation (eg, typical pitfalls such as unit-conversions or assumptions needed).  Given the limited amount of time on exams, see if there is a graph or table that you can use to quickly approximate the answer, instead of spending lots of time doing an exact calculation.

Tips for Midterm Exam:  To see a concise list in numerical order of chapters covered on this exam, go to the Assignments link and select Week 9.  The list is given in the "Wednesday" portion of that web page.

Tips for Homeworks. Do them on computer spreadsheets (such as Excel) or similar (e.g., R, Matlab, Mathematica, Maple, etc). Be sure to put a box around your answer, check the result, and provide a very brief discussion of the result. Also, to avoid loosing marks, list the Given and Find info, similar to the solved examples in Stull's chapters. A typical source of error on the homeworks is incorrect or mismatched units.

Tips for Spreadsheets. If you have little or no experience with Excel spreadsheets, don't worry.  During the first few weeks of term we teach an optional tutorial on how to use Excel to do your homeworks.   All UBC students have FREE access to Excel. See https://it.ubc.ca/software-downloads .  [CAUTION regarding the alternatives: A free alternative is OpenOffice, which you can download from the internet.  Or you can use the spreadsheet in Google Sheets.   WARNING: We don't provide support or help for using OpenOffice or Google Sheets, and we don't know if these apps have all the desired functionality for this course.  So we prefer that you use Excel.]

Tips about Computers. You will need a computer (desktop or laptop or equivalent) to take this course remotely due to COVID. UBC provide tips on how to "Keep Learning" remotely: https://keeplearning.ubc.ca/

Tips for online Warm-up Questions on the UBC Learning Management System (Canvas).  Think before you write.  I am looking only for one or two paragraphs for each question, so synthesize the material you read and distill it down to a few key sentences.  Capturing the essence of a topic will earn you more points than writing a treatise on it.  

The third question in each warm-up set always asks for the one part of the readings that was the most confusing to you, or which you had the most difficulty understanding.  Again, I am looking for a concise statement or phrase that identifies the ONE most confusing topic.  Not only does your answer to this question guide my lecture on the following day, but it is worth marks toward your overall grade.  So think about all that your read before you answer this.

Campus-wide Login (CWL).  The CWL is the user name and password that you were issued to use to access many UBC web pages.  It is free for all UBC students.  If you haven't received yours yet, please sign up immediately for a standard student account.
You will need it to access the Warm-up Questions on the UBC LMS (Canvas) server at UBC.

Tips on iClickers.   When you use the clicker software to choose A, B, C, D, E (or True / False), your response is talleyed with responses from all other students, and the distribution of responses is instantly available to me on my computer.  This helps me to gauge your understanding of the topic, which I will use to decide whether I need to go over a topic in more detail, or to move on to the next topic.  For many of the clicker questions I ask in class, I will encourage you to talk with your classmates in Zoom Breakout Rooms that I put you in, to reach a consensus, before you respond with the clicker.  This interaction with your peers helps you learn better, and makes the class much more active and fun.