Hi Bill,

I think it’s clear that CODAP is a platform for other projects. How old are the youngest students that have used CODAP? This leads me to wonder about how easy it is to begin using it and what “instructions” you have for students and/or teachers so they can quickly access it.

Elissa, I’m glad you think the “platform” aspect of CODAP comes across!

Middle school students have used CODAP and, in a research setting at least, have acquired amazing fluency with CODAP in 30-40 minutes. We are beginning a collaboration in which the developed materials will be used both by upper elementary and citizen scientists.

In classroom testing situations our collaborators have developed “guides” that live in the CODAP documents, and, in one instance these guides have contained very short videos on how to use CODAP in the given context.

We have it on our list to provide “on boarding” that collaborators can customize. I hope we get to do that!

Marius, we’d love to hear more about the APEX project and how you think CODAP might benefit/integrate with it.

Arthur—Excellent questions! I’ll take the “variety of sources” question first.

CODAP does make it easy to integrate data from several sources in one document. One example of this happens in Dan Damelin’s Building Models project (that is built on CODAP) in which students generate data from models they build and then compare that data with data from other sources to see the extent to which they match.

But most uses of CODAP involve single sources of data like a simulation, or a front end to a huge database, or a data game. And, since you can easily make documents that contain data, you don’t have to have a source.

Now for the cognitive challenges question: This is really interesting because there is so much we don’t yet have research for about how students view data and interact with data! The CODAP project itself has a research strand focussed on students’ understanding of hierarchical data. Somewhat surprisingly we find that left to their own devices, in a rich context, students develop hierarchies on their own. And, at least with CODAP, when they have dynamic linking between representations, they are pretty adept at figuring out hierarchical structures.

I know that’s not a complete answer to your question about cognitive challenges, but you have to start somewhere, right? ;-)

Arthur, one of the interesting cognitive challenges with using CODAP is also at the root of one of CODAP’s most useful features—the ease with which one can create visualizations. The quick drag-and-drop nature of setting up graphs allows students to follow their curiosity, but depending on the data-set, it may be possible to make graphs of two or more variables that are hard to interpret. However, one can experiment and easily make new graphs, following various paths through the data. Sometimes one ends in a blind alley, but one can quickly find one’s way back to productive explorations, not having expended a lot of time creating something that ended up not being helpful in making sense of the data.

Sarah-Kay, Thanks for your comment!
We’re doing some research using CODAP. Did a presentation at AERA but just checked and the online repository for the meeting isn’t up yet. Too bad.

But there is so much to investigate. Do you think CODAP could serve as a platform for data science education research?

Based just on what I’ve gleaned from the video this seems a real possibility—I’m definitely going to be looking at CODAP more closely, am very interested in thinking through what might be possible in that regard…Hope you won’t mind if I get back in touch after the Showcase ends (if not before!) to follow-up. Best, Sarah-Kay

Sarah-Kay, I look forward to it!

What a fascinating project. Certainly worth checking CODAP out. I wanted to read the abstract of the presentation you gave at AERA, however the link is broken! It will be wonderful to see what kind of results you were able to obtain with CODAP.

Hi May, I guess I obtained the link while logged in as a presenter. The page for the meeting <http://www.aera.net/EventsMeetings/AnnualMeetin... says the online repository is not up yet. Sigh. Write to me and I can email you the stuff we wrote.

Hi David. It’s great to know you think CODAP looks promising across 7-12. We are certainly designing it with that in mind!

Sensor integration has already been achieved by the InquirySpace project’s integration with CODAP. (https://authoring.concord.org/activities/698)

Yes, that was a NetLogo model integrated with CODAP! You can try out a number of NetLogo+CODAP examples at (http://concord-consortium.github.io/codap-data-...).

You, your co-teachers, and your students can play with CODAP now by going to (https://concord.org/projects/codap).

David, if you want to try the sensor activity Bill linked to above, make sure to install the Sensor Connector app found here: http://sensorconnector.concord.org

There is a link to it on the front page of that activity, but it may not be obvious. Our sensor connector app works with many USB connected probes from Vernier and Pasco.

Vishakha, thanks for the endorsement! I know you have been using CODAP in your work where its limitations don’t get in your way.

More funding would help, of course. But we’re also hopeful that the growing community of developers making use of CODAP will add capabilities such as those you desire.

Hi Gregory,
Yes, mentoring, tutorials, courses, PD, etc. are important pieces of the puzzle with respect to getting more students and teachers in more classrooms having more experiences working with data. I hate to say it, but developing the software is the easy part!

CODAP is different than Fathom in that it isn’t itself a product aimed at classroom use. What we’re hoping for is that other projects make use of CODAP for data analysis in their development of online curriculum materials. We think that by building on CODAP such projects will get a leg up on the technology that allows them to devote more resources to such things as professional development and teacher community building. Thanks for your comment!

Hi Emily, I agree with you that differentiating between causal and correlational is an important, conceptually difficult skill—much subtler than we might think!

We haven’t tackled statistics education with CODAP yet, but HollyLynne Stohl-Lee at NCSU has an NSF proposal named ESTEEM in the questions phase that, assuming it’s funded will be using CODAP as a platform for pre-service stats ed materials development. I’m very much looking forward to working with her and her team on issues like the one you raise.

Hi David. Thanks for your interest! Regarding connecting students to their immediate environments:
• There’s a conversation above about using CODAP with sensors
• We’ve just begun working with the StudentsDiscover project at NCSU on ways to use CODAP in citizen science contexts.

• Displaying data on maps is straightforward. If you have attributes with ‘latitude" and ’longitude’ (and a few other ad hoc spellings), points will automatically display in a map for each case.
• If you have an attribute ‘boundary’ whose values are geojson, these will display as boundaries on a map.

There are lots of limitations currently, but if you include us in a project we can work together on extending the GIS capabilities to meet your needs!

Hi Bill, What map projection(s) are you using? And is there a choice of projections?

We rely on Leaflet for maps. Currently you get whatever is Leaflet’s default. We don’t provide an interface for the user to change the projection, but there’s no reason we couldn’t (aside from UI clutter). Why do you ask?

Different map projections are useful for different purposes. For analyses that pertain to how large a region is, or how densely spaced a phenomenon is, you’d want to be using an equal-area map projection. The Mercator projections, the default in many school rooms, is optimized for ship navigation, because it shows compass courses accurately, but is quite distorted as to area. The reason I asked is because many common projections (Mercator, for example) deteriorate severely as you get close to the poles, and with so much attention on high latitude processes under conditions of global climate change, it seems to me important to be able to show high latitudes well on your maps.

Hi Kim! As someone thinking about a platform that can be adapted to many different projects, your comments about projections make me realize that to be adaptable we will need to make it easy for one project to add UI for something like map projection seamlessly. Thanks.

Hi Arthur,
In the 20 years prior to CODAP I worked on developing the desktop application Fathom. Part of that was professional development for teachers, mostly mathematics and statistics teachers. An important realization from that work is that few of us have “data immersion” experience and that making it possible for teachers to have such experience and to emerge loving data is the most important beginning point. Is that just too obvious?

Gregory,
Thanks for the pointer to EET. I took a quick look and could see why Fathom might not have been terribly useful in such an image-centric, GIS-oriented context. CODAP already has some GIS capabilities but not yet easy handling of the tiffs I saw on the EET site. But if the right partner comes along, we’re able to work with them to integrate such data analysis with the graphs and maps already present in CODAP.

Regarding Fathom, did you know that Concord Consortium now publishes it? See https://fathom.concord.org

Hi Joel,
Regarding instructional supports for the first session, I think there are two approaches: 1) Provide some generic introduction; 2) Make the first activity require little or no instructional support, e.g. just base it on selecting points. Different collaborators will take different approaches.

We talk about, but haven’t yet provided, a customizable on-boarding framework so that a collaborator could make an introduction that is context specific and brings up hints at appropriate times and places.

If you were working with CODAP what would you want?

Joel,
Our goal is to have impact through the projects we partner with. Several projects have developed introductions to CODAP customized to their particular topic area and method of integrating CODAP into their curriculum and/or existing tools.

We do plan to build out the CODAP help system and develop onboarding technology to help both new users who find CODAP outside of a partner project, and for our partners to more easily get their own users fully engaged with the range of features CODAP makes possible.

That would certainly be a great addition. It seems that the InquirySpace activities provide a good tutorial for teachers to explore, and an activity they could use to scaffold skills before more in-depth explorations. Outside of the partner projects you’ve worked with, have there been many teachers to independently use CODAP in their classrooms?

Hi Rob! I suppose I mean something similar to that other vague phrase “data habits of mind.” Intuitions about data help with data sleuthing and problem solving. “Why are all the points scrunched up? Oh, it must be because of this one outlier.” “Why has my computer become so slow? This must be a huge data set.” “Maybe instead of a continuous color gradation I could see things better with discrete boundaries.” “Data can feel like a fluid as it flows from one container to another.” “I bet if I zoom in here, I’ll see there is actually some structure and pattern.” Ooh, it’s fun to make up these kinds of statements and questions. What would you add?

Hi Bill! I used the phrase “Habits of mind” the other day, and someone wrote back to me: “You must mean ‘attitudes’. Why don’t you just say ‘attitudes’”. But I think this notion is very different. I guess the primary habit of mind I want to establish is the gut-reaction “What do the data say?”

Interesting to think that a habit of mind could be gastrointestinal. But I’m with you.

Hello Professor Bombay,
What do you anticipate would be the difficulties in doing so?