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.

Graphing inequations and inequalities in Sketchpad

cclancy asked the following question in the Physics forum:

Does anyone know how to graph x > 7 with Geometer's Sketchpad? Is it possible?

I consulted the chief Ontario Sketchpad guru, Shawn Godin and then replied:

It is possible to graph inequalities on a number line or in the plane.

Shawn Godin supplied the first sketch and I am not sure where I picked up the other.



I have been collecting resources for Sketchpad, including the mathforum discussion group where questions like this are routinely and professionally answered. If you need any help deconstructing the methods used in either sketch above, you can contact me through my blog.

Hope this helps,

Ross

Update (May 16): The inequalities in the plane sketch was sent to me by Paul Kunkel in response to a question on the Math forum. Scott Steketee is offering a similar sketch with custom tools to generate the inequations from the mathforum discussion group.

Strauss, Sketchpad, Photos, Quadratics and YouTube

I was hoping to post this from my new XO Laptop, but I have some figuring out to do about Flash, Opera, Linux and fat fingers.

However, I just had to post this video. Have you ever seen anything like it. Astonishing!

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.

Flash Graphing Tools

As part of the CLIPs project, we have been developing learning objects in Flash to support work in the Grade 11 Functions courses. Fortuitously, we came across a set of robust tools created by Doug Ensley, Shippensburg University and Barbara Kaskosz , University of Rhode Island, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, which include fantastic documentation. We have learned a lot about programming in Flash by using the tools.

There has been some functionality that we wanted to add, including labeling of axes and adding control points to graphs that necessitated creating our own version of the classes. Examples of our work and the original examples are available here.