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This module is designed to familiarize you with
the Fathom
software. You will use it to perform those tasks with data
sets that you normally encountered in the middle school through
high school curriculum. Fathom is a new software package
from Key Curriculum Press, that is designed to make the teaching
of statistical ideas dynamic; allowing students and teachers to
work with "real" data. Fathom does for the
teaching of statistical concepts what Geometer's Sketchpad did
for the teaching of Geometry.
This module will take you through installing the
software and using its most common features as you approach the
data analysis tasks found in the typical classroom. You
will treat data as a collection, work with data in formats
similar to what you see in a spreadsheet, and create assorted
graphs representing the data. Using stock market data, you
will examine correlations between a stock's fundamentals and the
stock's subsequent performance. You will start with data
sets and learn to model the data with appropriate
functions. Through simulation, you will predict the
results of a student election by taking a sampling of the
student population, and then examine how reliable the sampling
technique has been.
The data will come from a variety of sources; you will use
data that you enter directly into Fathom, data that you move
from a graphing calculator into Fathom, data you move from Excel
into Fathom, as well as data that you drag-and-drop directly
from the Internet.
This module is designed as an interactive tutorial on how
to use the Fathom Sketchpad software, and as an introduction to
how this application can be used in your classroom from the
pre-algebra level through an advanced high school level
statistics course. |
