Sydney Roberts - Technology Review
Shodor offers an applet that allows students to explore linear regression. With the applet students can enter their own data or copy and paste data from Excel. The applet will create a scatterplot with the data, and then allow students to estimate what they believe the line of best fit should be. Student can then check their solution by clicking the "Display line of best fit." On top of that, with the "Add Points," "Remove Points," and "Move Points" options, student can explore how one data point can affect the line of best fit.
Purpose of the Applet
According to Shodor, this activity can be used to
Although this applet can be used in any classroom focusing on analyzing bivariate data, the standards that can be addressed through this topic suggest that the target audience would be 8th-12th grade students.
- Teach students about how data influences the line of best fit.
- Provide students with practice in determining the line of best fit for some data.
- Introduce students to residuals.
- Allow students exploration with the linear correlation coefficient, r.
Although this applet can be used in any classroom focusing on analyzing bivariate data, the standards that can be addressed through this topic suggest that the target audience would be 8th-12th grade students.