How do people use sliders in their teaching?

[travisweiland@gmail.com]

Hi all, I have used sliders in desmos before but I am curious as to how people use sliders in codap for teaching? Thanks for your insights in advance.

[Bill Finzer]

Hello Travis,

As in Desmos, CODAP’s sliders are used as parameters in formulas. Here are some specific use cases:

1. In a scatter plot, it looks like the points fit nicely along some kind of curve. I plot a function in the scatter plot of the form y = x^k where k is the name I have given to a slider. Then I adjust the slider in an attempt to make the curve pass through the points. This is definitely simple enough that high school students can construct it.
2. We have incidence of smallpox by year from 1900 to 1960 for 88 countries. We want to display the countries on a map colored by smallpox incident for a given year, which is given by a slider. At the country level, we construct an attribute that tells us the incidence for that country in the slider’s year. We color the map with that attribute. Then when we drag or animate the slider the map colors show us the evolution of the disease over the world and over time. Too hard for students to construct, but useful for them to interact with.
3. Dan Damelin made a powerful model of climate change with upwards of eight sliders, each representing different factors. Adjusting these sliders allows the user to observe the effect of these factors. High school students with reasonable algebraic skills can construct such models, starting, of course, with a small number of slider parameters.

Perhaps others on this forum can suggest additional use cases?

Bill

[travisweiland@gmail.com]

Thank Bill. I am definitely going to have to play around with the sliders for the second example you proposed. Thanks for sharing your ideas

[Bill Finzer]

Here’s a fun example of time animation with a slider

[Kathy Shafer]

Hi, I have been using sliders to illustrate the effect of sample size on a distribution. In this example document, I created an attribute called arbitrary value. Since the attribute is generated with random(0,100) the values might not begin at 0 (good discussion topic).  RandomSampling100Cats_May2017_Slider is found here:

https://codap.concord.org/app/static/dg/en/cert/index.html#shared=20890

The dot plot with the MySample data is placed directly over the first plot (foreground).  The background was set to “Transparent” and the icons were set to black.

Setting up the sampler is pretty straightforward.

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