The SOCR website contains "a hierarchy of portable online interactive aids for motivating, modernizing and improving the teaching format in college-level probability and statistics courses." Each section of the site consists of an instructional applet with many customizable settings, and three sections are worth noting. First, Interactive distributions provides graphical illustrations of over 30 different statistical data distributions. An especially useful feature of this applet is the Info button -- when pressed, it takes the user to a detailed description of the selected
distribution. The second section allows the user to perform a variety of statistical analyses on pre-defined or manually input data. These include analysis of variance (ANOVA), regression and correlation, and more. The third section is a modeler for a user-defined function. The user can draw a curve and the applet will fit a trend line to the curve. A serious shortcoming of this site is the lack of documentation provided with certain applets; while this is not an issue with the aforementioned sections, it makes the two remaining sections nearly unusable. (The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology)
posted by Marcus Zillman |
5:56 PM
