Undergraduate computer lab designed to teach quantitative thinking in the context of Animal Behavior. Ideally, this lab would be taught as a supplement to a concurrent lecture course. Students are assumed to have completed one year of undergraduate calculus, and an introductory statistics class is useful.
Topics include bird song analysis (spectrograms), stochastic movement (diffusion and biased random walks), optimization of foraging strategies, evolutionary stable strategies (ess), spatial models of foraging, neural circuits, and frequency-dependent fitness. Math skills used include graphing, probability, arrays, logarithms, discrete-time models, and phase plane analysis.
Each module has one or more background modules (mini-modules) associated with it. Details can be found on the individual module pages. With the exception of "Introduction to Mathcad", the modules are designed to operate more or less independently of one another. So the order given below can be changed to accommodate teaching preferences.