MAT 230 for SNHU is an eight-week course that aims to increase student’s critical thinking skills. MAT 230 uses zyBooks for the study material, which consists of 8-chapters—one chapter per week.
How to Prepare for SNHU Mat 230
If you are new to new discrete math, be prepared for a lot of memorization and not taking. It is easy to get lost in the realm of math facts, theorems, and definitions, but that is why it is important to take notes progressively so that you can effectively build upon the topics covered in previous weeks.
Don’t skim through the zyBooks study material, otherwise, you will get stuck answering the exam and quiz problems.
Don’t underestimate the amount of time it takes to answer each quiz or exam question—plan ahead and give yourself enough time to work on quizzes and exams.
Have a plan for when you can’t understand a topic. Your best resource would be a 1-on-1 session with a tutorMe tutor, provided for free by SNHU. Don’t rely on your professor for intuition on this course, exchanging emails on a topic that would probably span to over 20 questions is not an ideal way of learning.
Mat 230 is a Prerequisite for CS-260 Data Structures and Algorithms
Despite Mat 230 being a Prerequisite for CS-260 Data Structures and Algorithms, I felt that there was nothing in Mat 230 that prepared me for CS 260 Data Structures and Algorithms. Maybe a felt this way because I had prior knowledge of using logical operations in PHP and had asked many recursion problems on Stack Overflow in the past.
Problem Sets
Problem sets are like quizzes. The average number of questions per quiz is about 7-questions, and each question consists of about 3-parts, a, b, and c. The Problem set questions are extracted from zyBooks additional resources sections and compiled into a zip folder for the student to use on overleafe.com.
The overleave software requires students to type their answers using LaTeX, download the file as a pdf, and submit it in Brightspace for grading.
MAT 230 Exams
MAT 230 has two exams, the first one is on week four and the last one is on week seven. The study material on zyBooks for those weeks is reduced by half. Surprisingly, the exams are shorter than the quizzes, but they combine questions from the material learned in previous weeks.
Both exams account for 30% of the grade, with each being worth 150 points. Just like quizzes, exams also require overleafe.com for completing the questions.
MAT 230 Discussions
There are only three class discussions for MAT 230. The first discussion is on the first week of class, and it is for students to introduce themselves. The second discussion is on the third week, and it relates to propositional proofs. The last discussion is on the last week of class, and it relates to cryptography.
zyBooks Study Material by Week
- Logic and Sets
- Proofs
- Counting and Discrete Probability
- Discrete Probability
- Functions and Relations
- Graphs and Trees
- Recursion
- Applications of Discrete Mathematics
What I Like About MAT 230
For computer science students, discrete mathematics should be an interesting branch of math to learn. I liked learning about proofs, conditional probability, and recursion.
What I Disliked About MAT 230
Some weeks had a lot of content to cover but little time to absorb the information. I also did not enjoy reading through some explanations in zyBooks, namely, properties of binary relations in Chapter-5 Functions and Relations.
The properties of binary relations are easy to understand, but zyBooks takes a longer, more complicated approach to explain the material. Compare section 5.7 Properties of binary relations to the simplicity in this youtube video. Actually, it is better to learn the material covered in sections 5.7 through 5.14 on Youtube.
Despite the slightly overly complicated explanations in zyBooks, the biggest bore would have to be using LaTex to answer the problem sets and exams.