Voting
One of the first and simplest uses of the ClassNet system was a voting program. Each student had a TI-83 calculator that was connected by a wire network to the teacher's laptop. The initial model allowed students to choose from a menu on their calculators of three burger chains. The results were automatically sent and displayed as a histogram on the teacher's calculator, which was projected on a screen. This program was then modified to be more general. Students could select from four choices (A, B, C, D), and the teacher could invent the categories -- choose the favorite of four movies, sneaker brands, rock groups, and so forth. When this was used in 6th and 7th-grade math classes in Boston, the teacher used it as an opportunity to explain a histogram, how to read it, and what it represented in terms of fractions and percent (bars relative to each other, and to the whole). He brought a parallel example from the day's newspaper. A natural extension would be to replace votes with random or non-random number choices enabling explorations of the concept of random variation and the effect of small sampling. Voting Activity
Uri Wilensky Northwestern University Evanston, IL		Walter M. Stroup The University of Texas Austin, Texas