Another August, another JSM… This time we’re in Boston, in yet another huge and cold conference center. Even on the first (half) day the conference schedule was packed, and I found myself running between sessions to make the most of it all. This post is on the first session I caught, The statistical classroom: student projects utilizing student-generated data, where I listened to the first three talks before heading off to catch the tail end of another session (I’ll talk about that in another post).
Like Rob, I recently got back from ICOTS. What a great conference. Kudos to everyone who worked hard to organize and pull it off. In one of the sessions I was at, Amelia McNamara (@AmeliaMN) gave a nice presentation about how they were using data and computer science in high schools as a part of the Mobilize Project. At one point in the presentation she had a slide that showed a screenshot of the dashboard used in one of their apps.
The other shoe has fallen. Last week (or so) Tinkerplots returned to the market, and now Fathom Version 2.2 (which is the foundation on which Tinkerplots is built) is available for a free download. Details are available on Bill Finzer’s website.
Fathom is one of my favorite softwares…the first commercially available package to be based on learning theory, Fathom’s primary goal is to teach statistics. After a one-minute introduction, beginning students can quickly discuss ‘findings’ across several variables.
Very exciting news for Tinkerplots users (and for those who should be Tinkerplots users). Tinkerplots is highly visual dynamic software that lets students design and implement simulation machines, and includes many very cool data analysis tools.
To quote from TP developer Cliff Konold:
Today we are releasing Version 2.2 of TinkerPlots. This is a special, free version, which will expire in a year — August 31, 2015. To start the downloading process
Next week, the UseR conference comes to UCLA. And in anticipation, I thought a little foreshadowing would be nice. Amelia McNamara, UCLA Stats grad student and rising stats ed star, shared with me a new tool that has the potential to do some wonderful things.LivelyR is a work-in-progress that is, in the words of its creators, a “mashup of R with packages of Rstudio.” The result is a highly interactive. I was particularly struck by and intrigued by the ‘sweeping’ function, which visually smears graphics across several parameter values.
You can read about DataFest, which is quickly going national, at the fivethiryeight blog:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-students-most-likely-to-take-our-jobs/
I read a blog post entitled On Not Writing and it felt a little close to home. The author, an academic who is in a non-tenure position, writes,
If you have the luxury to have time to write, do you write scholarship with the hope of forwarding an academic career, or do you write something you might find more fun, and hope to publish it another way?* The footnote read, “Of course, all of this writing presupposes that the stacks of papers get graded.
