PhET Estimation

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course PHY 241

7/3 05:35

The equation grapher is interesting - it seems to be restricted to quadratic and linear equations, but the implementation GUI is pretty slick. It was fun to play around for a bit - and I especially liked the ability to ‘deconstruct’ the components of a plot. I generally tend to use Winplot (http://math.exeter.edu/rparris/winplot.html) when I have to graph things on the computer.I’m afraid that I didn’t do too terribly well on the 1.26 Estimation applet. I did fine for the linear estimations, rather poorly for the square/cube estimations, and terrible for the circle/sphere estimations. I did a lot better when I selected the “Train” button than I did when I selected the “Play” button - but I’m not sure what the difference was in the questions. On Levels 1 and 2 I scored around 0.8 - 0.9 average accuracy most games, but my accuracy dropped to around 0.5 - 0.6 on Level 3. I made 25 estimates in each game at each level.

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Very good.

Volumes are particularly difficult to estimate, as we are both aware.

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