SOCR Wiki Activities Project
Contents
SOCR Project - SOCR Activities Project
Project goals
The goal of this project is to develop new hand-on dynamic activities demonstrating the utilization of various SOCR Tools, Data and resources.
Examples of activities
Explore the different SOCR tools, existing activities and data and either design a new activity, or extend and improve an existing SOCR activity. Some examples of proposed new activities are included below.
SOCR 3D Charts
Develop new SOCR activities for the new SOCR 3D Charts applet. For instance use any spatial or geographic data, e.g., [| California Ozone data], to render a 3D plot of 2 spatial and 1 altitude variables.
Random Rectangle Areas Activity
Design a new SOCR Applet and/or Activity that demonstrates estimation, random sampling, and bias. We can use line lengths, number of balls in urns, etc. Show how SOCR applets can be used to control many of the parameters (e.g., number of objects, the number of sub-objects, sizes, distributions, etc.) For example, this activity may demonstrate how subjective samples may be compared to random samples and whether there is sampling bias. The aim is to show why randomization is an important part of the process of data collection. This activity may also showcase the random sampling, parametric assumptions, the effects of the sample size, confidence and prediction.
- Look at the image and write down your guess as to the average area of the rectangles on the sheet. Each small square is one square unit. Then, guess of Average Area.
- Now select 5 representative rectangles and write down the area for each of them. Compute the average of the five areas, and compare it to your guess (are these close?)
- Use the SOCR random number generator to select 5 distinct random rectangles between 1 and 100, and find the average area of these 5 rectangles. Repeat this process 10 times, and record your average area each time.
- Repeat the previous step using a sample of 10 (instead of 5) distinct random rectangles and compute the average area. Do that again 10 times and record the average area.
- Using all these data, calculate the means, standard deviations, and the five-number summaries for these 2 distributions (samples of 5 or 10 rectangles).
- Questions:
- How do the centers and spreads of the various distributions compare?
- Which method of sampling (subjective or random) do you think is doing a better job? Why?
- How does the amount of spread in the 10-rectangle-based sampling distribution compare with the 5-rectangle-based sampling distribution? Which distribution gives a more trustworthy estimate of the true population mean?
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