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Tuesday, April 14, 2009

BOB v.9: Differential Equations

The intro exercises were simple at first since it's a review of chapter four, including those questions where we had to antidifferentiate the acceleration due to gravity twice to get displacement, until they started asking questions that I haven't learned until later on in the chapter. Luckily, I caught on, but, unfortunately, I still forget the +C when antidifferentiating...and it becomes more of a problem when there are more than two +C's for those questions where we antidifferentiate both sides after separating the variables. And antidifferentiating e^-t...I'll be prepared the next time I'm asked to antidifferentiate e^-t.

Solving differential equations graphically via slope fields, as I remember, was the easiest out of the three ways to solve a differential equation, since all there is to do is draw lines at each (lattice) point on the graph OR use prgmSLOPEFLD to draw the lines for me.

Solving differential equations numerically via Euler's method was a bit too much to absorb at first, but reviewing Newton's linear approximation technique was helpful since those two methods are similar.

Solving differential equations symbolically via separation of variables was a doozy, although I personally prefer this method over the numerical method, just because. Comparing the separation of variables questions in our book to the questions on slides, to me the slides were harder (and more helpful) since the slides had just more.

I'll admit the pretest wasn't my best pretest though, but I did keep track of where I went wrong! The main thing I need to watch out for are those +C's!

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