Taking the temperature of the class and a rock paper scissors lizard spock tournament

In Friday’s class I took a brief poll about how things were going for students in the class and then we all played rock paper scissors lizard spock tournaments.

A recording of the class is available here.

Class temperature check

At the start of class I asked you to rate from 0 to 10 the following aspects of the class:

  1. Pace (0 slow, 10 fast)
  2. Fun (0 boring, 10 good)
  3. Individual coursework (0 worried, 10 OK)
  4. Group coursework (0 worried, 10 good)
  5. Content/resources (0 bad, 10 good)
  6. Class time (0 bad, 10 good)

39 people responded and the results can be seen here share.cleanshot.com/XZrFhT0x:

  1. Pace got a score of 5.4 out of 10.
  2. Fun got a score of 8.2 out of 10.
  3. Individual coursework got a score of 4.7/10.
  4. Group coursework got a score of 3.7/10.
  5. Content/resources got a score of 7.1/10.
  6. Class time got a score of 7.4.

Overall I think this looks about right. I understand the worry about the assessment. For the individual work we will spend time preparing for it (I promise). For the group coursework please do approach me to discuss ideas.

A rock paper scissors lizard tournament

After discussing how the class was going, I invited you to play a rock paper scissors lizard tournament.

The first time I heard of this game (a variation of rock paper scissors) was in an episode of the Big Bang Theory. You can find a clip of it here: YouTube and a summary of the rules are available here.

After everyone played their tournaments (a knock out with a final), we had a discussion about how to win. A number of suggestions came up including:

Before finishing up, I briefly showed how the game could be represented mathematically:

\[A = \begin{pmatrix} 0 & -1 & 1 & 1 & -1\\\\\\ 1 & 0 & -1 & -1 & 1\\\\\\ -1 & 1 & 0 & 1 & -1\\\\\\ -1 & 1 & -1 & 0 & 1\\\\\\ 1 & -1 & 1 & -1 & 0\\\\\\ \end{pmatrix}\]

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