[Bill Finzer]

Hello,

You’re right. Recent changes to the Sampler made it so the Duck Pond no longer produces the results desired. (The changes were deliberate.)

Here’s a workaround for now: After each time you press Start, edit the value of experiment to something other than “1;” for example “a.” Then when you press Start the new experiment will, once again, get the value of 1, which you could then edit to something else, perhaps “b.”

I’m going to check with the designers of the Duck Pond example document to see if they have a better idea.

Thanks very much for pointing this out!

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Joachim,

Sorry to say, there isn’t any way other than to manually drag. I’ll add this to our feature request list thought.

Thanks reporting your wish for it.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Travis,

1. Create a new attribute stateCode with the formula:
   subString(full geo codes, 2, 2).
   This extracts (as a number) the code for the state.
2. Import into your document a dataset that has each state and its code. Let’s say its name is states_with_codes and that it has attributes code and name.
3. Back in the original dataset create a new attribute stateName with the formula:
   lookupByKey(“states_with_codes”, “name”, “code”, stateCode)
4. You’ll probably want to Delete Formula (Keeping Values) for both of these new attributes you’ve created.

You can actually replace step 3 with a join move. Drag the code attribute from your imported dataset on top of stateCode and release. Voilá! You’ve joined the two datasets.

Hope this helps.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Here’s a fun example of time animation with a slider

[Bill Finzer]

Hello Travis,

As in Desmos, CODAP’s sliders are used as parameters in formulas. Here are some specific use cases:

1. In a scatter plot, it looks like the points fit nicely along some kind of curve. I plot a function in the scatter plot of the form y = x^k where k is the name I have given to a slider. Then I adjust the slider in an attempt to make the curve pass through the points. This is definitely simple enough that high school students can construct it.
2. We have incidence of smallpox by year from 1900 to 1960 for 88 countries. We want to display the countries on a map colored by smallpox incident for a given year, which is given by a slider. At the country level, we construct an attribute that tells us the incidence for that country in the slider’s year. We color the map with that attribute. Then when we drag or animate the slider the map colors show us the evolution of the disease over the world and over time. Too hard for students to construct, but useful for them to interact with.
3. Dan Damelin made a powerful model of climate change with upwards of eight sliders, each representing different factors. Adjusting these sliders allows the user to observe the effect of these factors. High school students with reasonable algebraic skills can construct such models, starting, of course, with a small number of slider parameters.

Perhaps others on this forum can suggest additional use cases?

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Travis,

Choosy came about with a project that has some very large datasets; i.e. many attributes and many cases. Project staff wanted a tool that would help them create new documents that contain datasets with a subset of attributes and cases tailored for relatively specific classroom teaching contexts.

You have probably already surmised that Choosy is not useful for students, at least until they themselves are working with such large datasets. It’s meant for teachers and curriculum developers.

Often a Choosy user, after having trimmed a dataset down, will export that dataset and import it into a new document. That way all the unneeded data will have been left on the cutting room floor.

Hope that helps. Let us know if you find uses for Choosy yourself!

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Jason,

Unfortunately the text API expects an object rather than simply a string. (Probably we should extend it to simply deal nicely with a string, too.)

Here’s an example of a simple (sic) such object:

{
 "object": "value",
 "document": {
  "children": [
   {
    "type": "paragraph",
    "children": [
     {
      "text": This is where selected </span>${<span style="font-style: italic;">pluralize</span>(<span style="color: #000080; font-weight: bold;">this</span>.<span style="color: #660e7a; font-weight: bold;">targetAttributeName</span>)}<span style="color: #008000; font-weight: bold;"> appear.
     }
    ]
   }
  ],
  "objTypes": {
   "paragraph": "block"
  }
 }
}

You can discern the object format at this Storybook site. I hope that helps.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Andee,

There is a way to change the display in the case table or card however. Bring up Attribute Properties, change the type to date and then set the precision to what you want, in this case month.

Hope that helps.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Según tengo entendido, puede crear un componente de texto, pero solo puede ingresar un solo carácter. No hemos oído hablar de este problema antes. ¿Qué tipo de computadora estás usando y qué navegador web?

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Seth,

No, there isn’t. It would be a fairly straightforward plugin to create, but none of our collaborators have prioritized (or even requested) it. You can copy data from a spreadsheet and paste into CODAP using the Import Data from Clipboard command on a case table’s or case card’s ruler menu.

Got any programmer students up for a challenge?

Thanks for the question,

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hello and thanks for reporting this problem. I was able to reproduce the error and we should be able to fix it soon.

I’ll also log your request for the ability to change the count scale to a relative frequency scale. This is not something currently possible in CODAP.

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Chris,

Do you have any reason to suspect bandwidth/connectivity issues?

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hi Ryan,

Unfortunately there is no direct control over size of sectors in the spinner. The size of a sector is determined by the number of items (as seen in the mixer) that have a given name. So, if you are looking at a spinner and click the ‘+’ icon this adds a new sector. Change its name to be the same as one of the existing sectors and that increases the size of that sector.

[Bill Finzer]

Hi,

Can you be more specific? Is the trouble with example/sample docs, a document you’ve save locally, a document saved on Google Drive? What steps lead to the problem? What exactly happens?

Bill

[Bill Finzer]

Hello,

Thanks for the questions.

1. There is no way to import multiple sheets from excel at the same time. If you use Numbers instead of Excel, there is a shortcut for doing the importing that you may find helpful. Select the cells in a given sheet. Press the mouse down and, after a brief pause, drag from Numbers into the CODAP document and release. This is supposed to work in Excel, but I tried just now with Excel on my Mac and couldn’t get it to work. If you’re using Excel on Windows you may have better luck. If so, then this at least eliminates the exporting step.
2. Regarding interpolation, CODAP doesn’t have a particular function for this. But I could imagine cobbling something together making use of the prev and next functions as in
   

   if(value=””,(prev(value)+next(value))/2, value)

   but that’s certainly not very general purpose.

Bill

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