Monday, November 29, 2010

Making errors!!

Sometimes long time errors can sneak up on you and beat you over the head. I have avoided the term bar graph for a few years and was under the misconception that the width of the bar has as much meaning as the height. I always use the term column graph for discrete data drawn in bars.

I have no idea where this misconception comes from, but I will have a look through texts I have used over the last few years - I must have misread one of them (I did find a strange Histogram in one of my stat books when width of the columns was important to do with graphing different sized class boundaries). This all would have been fine if I had figured it out myself.

That would have been too easy.. Of course I was asked the question by my HoD whilst he was teaching his class and using my room (as it was air conditioned and empty) and I corrected him calling it a column graph (cringe). I should have known he was right - as he is rarely wrong.. I had to come back and eat some humble pie..

That's life I suppose.. I'm glad it doesn't happen too often!

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Greenfoot

Greenfoot is another attempt to bring programming to students. It has a textbook that can be purchased and an established user group. It is well worth a look if starting a computer programming class and you wish to use Java.

Here is a link: http://www.greenfoot.org/.

Have a look

Russ.