This paper develops a spreadsheet simulation methodology for teaching simulation and performance analysis of priority queues with multiple servers, without resorting to macros, add-ins, or array formula. The approach is made possible by a "single overtaking" simplifying assumption under which any lower-priority customer may be passed in…

Solution equilibria diagrams are excellent tools for understanding chemical speciation in multireaction chemical systems. They are usually plotted using software packages that efficiently perform advanced calculations, giving the possibility to graphically visualize thermodynamic and composition information. However, this approach frequently…

This article outlines a series of lessons the author led to help students understand gerrymandering, which is the practice of drawing district boundaries to favor a particular group or party and which undermines the fairness of a representative democracy. These lessons were developed to capture student interest and engagement by linking…

In many science and engineering undergraduate programmes, physics courses are fundamental and can be seen as a potential place where students can develop complementary abilities such as the computational thinking process. The present work proposes and describes the learning science and engineering with electronic spreadsheets cycle (LSEESC)…

NoSQL databases have been used in organizations for decades. Few database textbooks on the market, however, have suitable materials about NoSQL beyond general introductions for typical business students. In fact, users of the typical NoSQL systems on the software market need to have certain computer programming skills. This teaching tip introduces…

Data Analytics has grown dramatically in importance and in the level of business deployments in recent years. It is used across most functional areas and applications, some of the latter including market campaigns, detecting fraud, determining credit, identifying assembly line defects, health services and many others. Indeed, the realm of…

Summary statistics and data visualizations are often used to explore data and draw preliminary conclusions. Although valuable, these tools do not always reveal the underlying patterns and trends in the data and can sometimes be misleading. We describe an approach for teaching the need for more advanced statistical analysis using multiple linear…

The COVID-19 pandemic has made mathematical epidemiology a topic of critical importance, providing mathematics educators with an unparalleled opportunity. This opportunity is accompanied by a challenge: how do mathematics educators, some of whom have little personal experience with mathematical modeling, teach mathematical epidemiology to their…

Students often struggle with the concept of dependence of events or random variables. We present a simple coin flipping game that yields surprising results due to the dependencies within the game. The game is simple enough for young children to understand and play, yet complex enough to yield results that are counterintuitive to even most graduate…

It's not surprising that rainbows have received a great deal of attention: in textbooks, in magazines, and on the web. They are, after all, beautiful, fascinating, occasionally awe-inspiring, even a little mysterious. They are an almost perfect blend of natural beauty and simple physics. Has everything that can be said about rainbows already been…

Biological systems exhibit strong dynamic variations; for example, a system may have a tendency towards either a steady state, periodic behaviour or chaotic oscillations. These findings, explained by dynamic systems theory, have allowed researchers to formally relate a wide variety of systems, such as the theory of rumour propagation, glucose…

The Birthday Paradox problem can be investigated either with a carefully constructed spreadsheet (for greatest precision) or a calculator process (for reasonable precision). A number of ways of approaching this problem as a class activity are provided.

It has become increasingly important for future business professionals to understand statistical computing methods as data science has gained widespread use in contemporary organizational decision processes in recent years. Used by scores of academics and practitioners in a variety of fields, Monte Carlo simulation is one of the most broadly…

The simple vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a common topic of discussion in introductory operations research/management science courses. The VRP can be framed in a variety of ways, and it can be difficult to solve to optimality. For solution purposes, introductory textbooks demonstrate how Excel's Evolutionary Solver (ES) add-in produces a…

This teaching brief describes an engaging, in-class exercise that introduces genetic algorithms as well as advanced Excel functions and capabilities by modeling the familiar Sudoku puzzle. Student groups are first asked to manually solve a given puzzle and then translate that solution methodology to a spreadsheet model. This exercise can be used…