Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

TinkerPlots

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Stable release
  
2.3.2 / December 2015

Type
  
Educational software

Website
  
Official website

Operating system
  
Mac OS X, Windows

License
  
Proprietary

Developer(s)
  
Clifford Konold and Craig D. Miller

TinkerPlots is exploratory data analysis and modeling software designed for use by students in grades 4 through university. It was designed by Clifford Konold and Craig Miller at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is currently published by the Learn Troop. It runs on Windows XP or later and Mac OS 10.4 or later. The program allows users to enter their own data, to import them from other applications or the Web, or to generate them using a sampling engine. The program also comes with 50 multivariate data sets.

Contents

Using TinkerPlots, students can make a large variety of graphs, including those specified for middle school in Common Core State Standards for Mathematics But rather than making these graphs directly using commands, students construct them by progressively organizing cases using basic operations including “stack,” “order,” and “separate.” Responding to these operations, case icons animate into different screen positions. The interface was based on observations of people organizing “data cards” on a table to make graphs to answer specific questions

Innovations of TinkerPlots include using a superimposed color gradient to detect covariation in two numeric attributes and a “hat plot,” a reformulated and generalized version of the box plot.

The latest version is 2.3.2. This version does not have substantively different features from versions 2.1 and 2.2, but has a number of bug fixes.

Critical acclaim

  • ComputED 2010 Best Educational Software (BESSIE) Award
  • ComputED 2008 Education Software Review (EDDIE) Award.
  • Parents' Choice Silver Honor, 2005
  • Technology & Learning Award of Excellence, 2005

    • Educational Materials using TinkerPlots

  • Konold, C. (2005). Exploring Data with TinkerPlots. Key Curriculum Press, ISBN 1-55953-750-7. Contents: Getting Started, Learning TinkerPlots, Teaching with TinkerPlots, Activities, Activity Notes. [1]
  • Brodesky, A., Doherty, A., & Stoddard, J. (2008). Digging into Data with TinkerPlots. Key Curriculum Press, 225 pp. ISBN 978-1-55953-885-5. Contents: (1) Comparisons, Distributions, and Line Plots: Exploring Data about Cats, (2) Comparisons and Boxplots: Investigating Data about Middle-School Students, (3) Comparisons using Formulas: Investigating Data about Signatures and Words, (4) Measures of Center and Histograms: Analyzing Safety Data, (5) Relationships between Attributes and Scatter Plots: Investigating Sports Data. [2]
  • Walsh, T. (2009). The Survey Toolkit: Collecting Information, Analyzing Data, and Writing Reports. Contents: Choosing a Research Question, Developing and Giving the Survey, Analyzing Survey Data, Sharing Results. 112pp. ISBN 978-1-55953-886-2. [3]
  • TinkerPlots Instructional Movies (2010). These 10 short movies where developed by the Statistics Education Research Group in 2010, and published with TinkerPlots, in QuickTime and AVI format. Titles: TinkerPlots Basics, Adding Data, Making Common Graphs, Comparing Groups, Exploring Relationships 1, Exploring Relationships 2, Building a Data Factory, Simulating Group Differences, Probabilities Simulation, Creating Sample Spaces [4]
  • TinkerPlots Workshop Guide (2007). ISBN 978-1-55953-961-6. [5]
  • TinkerPlots Walkthrough Guide and Quick Reference Card (included in Instructors Evaluation Edition).
  • Free TinkerPlots Activities and Resources on Key Curriculum Website
  • Free TinkerPlots Activities and Resources on University of Massachusetts Website

    • History

  • TinkerPlots 2.3, published August, 2015 by Learn Troop.
  • TinkerPlots 2.2, published June, 2014 by University of Massachusetts Amherst.
  • TinkerPlots 2.1, published November, 2012 by Key Curriculum.
  • TinkerPlots 2.0, published April, 2011 by Key Curriculum.
  • TinkerPlots 1.1, published June, 2009 by Key Curriculum.
  • TinkerPlots 1.0, published September, 2004 by Key Curriculum.

    • References

    TinkerPlots Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA