Browsing by Author "Mazibuko, Godfrey Nkululeko."

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Investigation of the South African public TVET colleges’ engineering official mathematics curriculum for entry level artisans.
(2023) Mazibuko, Godfrey Nkululeko.; Maharaj, Aneshkumar.
One of the main objectives of any mathematics curriculum is to equip students with the necessary thinking skills for real-world problems. As the world evolves every day of our lives, so do the people living in it. Hence, the same exceptional functioning curriculum used in previous years is highly possible to be dysfunctional in the current days. Therefore, time and again curriculum evaluation is essential for both Basic and Higher education. However, before the actual curriculum evaluation, one should identify or develop suitable evaluation tool/s. In that regard, this study focused on the evaluation of the public Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges’ mathematics curriculum from N1 to N2. Initially, the intention of the current study was to collect data across all KwaZulu-Natal TVET Colleges, which was unsuccessful due to a lack of cooperation from some of the TVET colleges’ gatekeepers. The study was only able to access the eMnambithi TVET College data set, where 47 students participated. Two aspects were evaluated, namely, the participating students’ attainment of the curriculum objectives and the ability of the curriculum to equip students with high order thinking skills (HOTS). The Tyler’s objective model was adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum to train students for the attainment of the curriculum’s objectives. That was done using the pre- and post-assessments method as stated by the pioneer of that model. The results indicated that the curriculum was most likely to be incapable of equipping the students for the attainment of its own objectives. Further on, this study used the Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model to develop a new model called the Susceptible Vaccinated-Healthy-Infected-Recovered (SVHIR) model. The SVHIR model was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the curriculum to equip students with HOTS. Also, the results obtained from the SVHIR model indicated that the curriculum was most likely to be incapable of equipping the students with HOTS. It was also found that the students’ ability to attain the curriculum objectives and their HOTS have a strong linear relationship. The latter implied that fully equipping students with HOTS should enable them to better attain the curriculum objectives. The convenience sampling supports the need to conduct a future study that covers all the TVET colleges that did not respond to the researcher’s request for access on time. Further pursuance will give more clarity and findings that may or may not differ that much with the ones of this reported study.
Study of lower sampling intervals on rainfall queue characteristics over Radio Links in South Africa.
(2017) Mazibuko, Godfrey Nkululeko.; Afullo, Thomas Joachim Odhiambo.; Alonge, Akintunde Ayodeji.
Rainfall attenuation in tropical and subtropical regions of the world has continued to attract great interest; as there is a urgent emphasis on proper spectrum management and sharing, particularly at microwave and millimeter bands above 10 GHz. To this end, there have been arguments pertaining to the need to improve the ‘sensing’ of rainfall events to enhance the opportunities provided by adaptive rain fade mitigation schemes, while conserving base station power requirements during rainy events. To implement this approach, an extensive understanding of rainfall time series via the available statistical tools is often required to properly harness the characteristics of rainfall behavior. To this end, a study was undertaken to examine the behavior of rainfall and its impact on radio links at 1-minute sampling time by using the Queueing Theory Technique (QTT). Interesting results were obtained in the process of the study, except that the effect of the sampling time on rainfall queues remained unknown. Therefore, this thesis presents the investigation of the sampling time effects on rainfall queues over radio links in Durban, South Africa. Rainfall measurements were collected at 30-second sampling time using the RD-80 Joss–Waldvogel (JW) distrometer in Durban (29o52’S, 30o58’E), the same location where the 1-minute data was previously collected. As before, the rainfall data is classified into four rainfall regimes, namely drizzle, widespread, shower and thunderstorm. The queue parameters required for rainfall traffic analysis such as inter-arrival time and service-time distribution are empirically determined to be Erlang-k distributed, whereas the overlap time is exponentially distributed. It is thus established that the queue discipline for rain spikes over radio waves is a non-Markovian process (Ek/Ek/s/∞/FCFS). Comparison between the 30-second rainfall queues results and previous results of 1-minute sampling time, shows that more rainfall spikes are revealed at 30-second sampling time. Furthermore, it is determined that there is a strong polynomial relationship between the 30-second and 1-minute sampling time data – hence some of the 1-minute data may be converted into 30-second data by using the polynomial function, with the appropriate polynomial coefficients according to rainfall queue parameters in each regime. The converted data is amalgamated with the actual 30-second data for the investigation of the rainfall long-term behavior. It is found that the rainfall long-term behavior resembles the behavior of the short-term data - hence implying that the rainfall process at 30-second sampling time in Durban has the attributes of a self-similar process. From rain attenuation investigation, it is determined that since more rain spikes are evident in the 30-second data, the former has higher rain attenuation exceedance values (R0.01) compared to the 1-minute data.