EAE2011: Environmental Problem Solving and Visualisation

40% Assignments
The computer labs each week involved using R Studio (a coding program) to solve problems/answer questions related to the environment (eg. pollution inflow vs water outflow of a lake, how the populations of two species that rely on each other coexist). Computer labs run for all 12 weeks, and 8 of these involve an assignment (so each assignment is worth 5% of the final mark). You start the assignment in the comp lab, and it is due on the Monday of the following week. The assignments usually involve being given a bit of starting code, and then having to finish/fill in/copy and paste parts of it to solve questions. Assignments 1-3 are done alone and relatively simple if you have background knowledge of statistics, hypothesis testing and linear regression. Assignments 4-8 are done in small groups (2-3 people) and look at much more complex topics (eg. derivatives and integrations). Computer lab work was a struggle for most people, as the majority of us has not done a programming/coding subject before and a fair few had also not done a maths or statistics unit either.

10% Mid-semester test
This test was run in the first lecture of week 5 and was based on the lecture content of weeks 1-4. There was a practice/sample test online with answers that could be completed for revision, and it was very similar to the actual test. It was quite short and most people finished before the lecture ended. The questions themselves were relatively simple, with only one or two curveball/outside the box questions.

50% Exam
The exam was two hours and a calculator was allowed. There was a sample exam with answers for revision which was similar to the exam. There were also the tutorial sheets with answers that could be completed for revision. Like the midsem test, the exam was quite short, and most people left the exam before finishing time. Questions were made up of multiple parts worth 1 or 2 marks and involved either analysing data, looking at computer code, performing a simple hypothesis test or doing short calculations.

This unit is fairly new and was initially designed to be a stepping stone for the atmospheric science major (it can be used as a prerequisite for EAE2122 - intro to atmospheric physics and dynamics), however now that there are a lot of people using it as an elective or minor subject for environmental science, earth science or geography, it may be changed a little bit to reflect that.

There were good and bad parts of this unit. The first few weeks included fairly simple content, including statistics, hypothesis testing, regression, correlation and time series analysis. Halfway through the unit, the difficulty suddenly increased and the topics taught included rate of change/derivatives, integrations, vectors and principal component analysis. Having taken methods in VCE, I was familiar with differentiation and integration, however some people had done very little maths prior to taking this unit, making the difficult stuff even more challenging. The speed at which the content was taught made it difficult to find time to review these harder aspects. Many people agreed that the jump in difficulty in this unit between the different sections was hard to manage.

In general, lectures were very poorly attended and not super interesting, sometimes dragging on or dwelling on unimportant aspects, but they taught the content sufficiently. Tutorials did not have marked attendance, so attendance also slipped throughout semester, especially because no work done in the tutorials were assessed and the questions and answers were available on moodle. Tutorials essentially aimed to reinforce the lecture content by presenting problems and questions that needed to be solved using either a hypothesis test (eg. chi-square test), determining the rotation and divergence of a vector field or developing a model/equation to describe a environmental relationship. As mentioned, the computer labs used R Studio to model and solve environmental problems.
In summary, this was an okay unit that may need a bit of changing to help support students more, with an average workload.

Dr. Dietmar Dommenget, Dr. Ruth Reef

No past exams, but one sample exam with answers.

3 out of 5

Yes, with screen capture

No textbook required.

2x1hr lectures, 1x1hr tutorial, 1x2hr computer lab

2018, Semester 1