Every semester without fail students will ask me for advice on what to study, where to find work to study, and how they can improve.
Let me embrace the old man inside my presumably youthful appearance?? 😛
Back in my day when I traveled uphill both ways to Mesa Community College in the snow, we had physical books and physical homework. The book would have the answers of the odds (usually) and the homework assigned would be 20 odd problems of the evens. You would do the odds for practice and check the answer in the back of the book and then submit your homework, the evens, and get whatever grade you got. There was no reassurance.
This was an effective way to learn. You had a few examples at the beginning of each section, and you had answers to validate your work. The problem is that as the problems became more and more complicated, one tiny error would drastically change your final answer and we found ourselves banging our heads around for hours trying to find out the error. Where in some cases, the answer was provided in error and the author released an Errata after the publication of the version we had for the course.
As it stands for every semester in perpetuity, you engineering students have more resources than any students that have preceded you for the course you are currently taking. That’s because, every semester more and more faculty put up online more and more information whether it is through their own websites, YouTube, places like Kahn Academy, etc…
So when students ask me, “Where can I go to get more information?”, I am at an informational overloaded loss. It’s EVERYWHERE. That being said, I do see students perceived frustration in that, literally they are also under an information overload and they’re trying to optimize the time spent and want a direct path towards their course problem types which should equate to doing well on the exam and the course overall.
With that in mind, I have a few suggestions for students for some sites that I find to be useful, as well as some work I’ve done with my own sites and app(s) to help aid students struggling with the mathematics courses for Engineering Majors.