Review for:Graphical Analysis

posted: on November 2, 2006 at 9:40AM

physics

1000 topics -- every topic that has a lab we use graphical analysis

to graph data and find the equation of best fit

A.P., Honors or Advanced, Intro or Regular, Remedial

my students took their data from excel into graphical analysis to make the graphs and best fit of the graph;

also I gave them a graph of angle in vs. angle exit based on snell's law for refraction and low level math students used it to solve refraction problems

Increases graphing skills, Increases modeling skills, Increases data collection & analysis skills, Increases student engagement and motivation

this program makes graphing a breeze; I think that how to make a graph is primarily a job for a math teacher; many students have been turned off to physics because of how long it took to find out something interesting; to have to make a graph and decide the scale and use rulers to label axes and then make the best fit and find two points to come up with the equation for the line (intentional run on sentence), is so time consuming that by the time you are ready to see how interesting the results are many students are turned off

graphical analysis is easy and with few exceptions very intuitive, it is also pretty powerful -- ex. one button that will make a best fit line to the data; it can also do a variety of curve fitting (both automatic and manual)

sometimes the text in the notes window isn't saved

harder to work with multiple data sets -- you can get two lines on the same graph it just isn't as easy as I would like

defaults to using connecting lines (which is a personal pet peeve)

I really have to think about it to come up with minor difficulties I have with the program; this is an excellent program and I don't know why everyone with a computer doesn't use it.