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Development
The development of Probability Explorer began in December of 1998 while the author was a doctoral student at the University of Virginia. What began as a quest to build a microworld environment to meet the author's immediate teaching needs, grew into an intellectual endeavor to design a research-based software tool for students. The overall goal in designing Probability Explorer was to create an open-ended environment that could easily be used by students to simulate random phenomena and explore interesting chance situations. The chance situations could be in the context of a game (e.g., dice games) or real world uncertainties (e.g., weather). The tools and actions available in the computer environment have been purposefully designed to invoke perturbations in students' current understandings of probability concepts, encourage active reflection and abstraction to refine those conceptions, and facilitate the development of appropriate probabilistic reasoning. Until August 2001, all design and programming of Probability Explorer was done by the author, Hollylynne Stohl. Since that time, software engineer Scott Haynes has been the lead programmer on the project. Many of the features in version 2.0 would not have been possible without his expertise. Thanks Scott! Development History:
Probability Explorer (c) Hollylynne Stohl Lee, 1999-2005 Development partially funded by Center for Technology and Teacher Education, University of Virginia |
