The CLIPS uberCalculator launched!

I have had the privilege of working on the development of a set of learning objects supporting an instructional trajectory in Fractions, Periodic Functions and Linear Patterns, called CLIPS.

There has been a lot of effort to design a wrapper to complement these activities. One of the elements of this wrapper has been a simple calculator. Recently, Greg Clarke completely overhauled the CLIPS calculator to support four modes: Basic, Scientific, Graphing and Conversion. Greg was able to take advantage of the work of others who have freely shared their code in the opensource spirit. The calculator is available inside CLIPS by clicking its icon at the top right. It is also available standalone at www.oame.on.ca/clips/calculator.html. The URL can be appended with ?mode=basic or ?mode=sci or ?mode=graphing or ?mode=conv as above to jump directly to one of the versions. A drop-down list is used to switch between modes, open the calculator in another window (which makes it resizeable) and to download the .swf locally for offline use, perhaps on an interactive white board.

The CLIPS calculator is now prominently catalogued at the Mathfest wiki page of online calculators, which has lots of other interesting online tools listed.

One nice, inobtrusive feature is that when the equals sign is pressed, the answer is copied to the user's clipboard, ready to be pasted into an answer text field in CLIPS or wherever it might be required. I now have the CLIPS calculator as a link in my quick launch bar.

Math on a SMART, I mean Interactive White, Board

In a shout out to someone he calls the Northern Mathman, Geoff Day drew my attention to this incredible Java application for doing mathematics that is particularly well-suited to an IWB or tablet. Although it doesn't work quite as well for me as it does in this introductory video, with a little practice it could change the way I think about equations and mathematical calculations.

You can download it or use it directly on the web.

Online and Free Calculators and CASs

I made a couple of minor edits to my Wiki page about online basic calculators, scientific calculators, graphing calculators, CAS systems, and plotting utilities today.

It still blows me away how much is available online and how good the quality is. Yacas (yet another CAS) has a tab called My Yacas that provides quick access to the list of commands and to the actual CAS engine - no download required.

Now, if only math students had the kind of access to computers and the internet that would allow them to use these tools routinely in school.

Update: Don't miss the link above to the actual page listing online calculators, CASs, graphing utilities etc.