42 Other cool tools
We have designed other plugins for CODAP that you might enjoy. These have their own online booklets in the same style as this book.
42.1 Simmer
Simmer
was originally designed as a probability simulation tool where you program it using a block-programming interface (à la Scratch, in fact based on the Blockly library from Google).
So, for example, if you wanted to simulate rolling two dice and adding, you might write this program:
This will result in a CODAP table with 36 cases with suitable random values in the die1
and die2
columns.
42.2 Arbor
Arbor
lets you construct and analyze classification trees. These are very interesting alternatives to traditional graphs that work well whenever you’re trying to sort cases into two groups.
One good context is medical: you’re trying to diagnose patients as sick or well. But there are other great contexts such as spam detection, as in, based on the subject line of an email, can you tell if it’s spam or not?
Here’s another: what characteristics of Titanic passengers are associated with survival? Here is an arbor
tree made with that data:
The tool will also let you make a confusion matrix (the familiar 2x2 table) of your diagnoses and see a mosaic plot of that information.
For a lot more about trees, click this link for the arbor
guide.
As you will see, that guide is also an online resource for a 2023 paper from Teaching Statistics.