Math in Art - kolams of South India

Math and art is always a fascinating topic in a math for liberal arts class. To broaden the students' perspectives, one could include kolam designs. These are designs that women draw in front of their houses in southern India, especially in the state of Tamil Nadu. In northern India, a similar type of threshold design is called rangoli.



Kolams are made with dots and loops around the dots The classic kolams are done only in white rice powder. However, the colorful rangolis from North India have influenced many kolam designs as well. Click here for a lot of interesting material on kolams, including connections to computer algorithms and knot theory.

(Kolam Image Source - http://pudukkottai.org/archieve/pongal-2003/index.html)

Math in the Digital Age Presentation

For those seeking to include modern applications in their math courses, here's my presentation that includes some examples.

Stats on dev math and college graduation

I've been trying to find out for a while now about longitudinal studies on the graduation rates of students in developmental programs in college. The National Center of Education Statistics (NCES) has published a study which provides the data on that issue as well as many others. In fact you can create your own tables with their Quickstats feature. The study I looked at was the following.

Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS), which follows first-time students beginning their postsecondary education, typically over a period of 6 years. The 1995-96 cohort was followed through 2001.

The data only talks about any remedial course, not math specifically. Nevertheless, one can see from the table that 65% of students who took any developmental course in 1995-1996 did not obtain any degree by 2001. Out of students not taking any developmental courses, 45% did not obtain any degree in that same time period.
So I do wonder if developmental courses in college are helpful only to some limited extent.