Interactivate: What's New

Interactivate 3.0 was released in order to provide the Project Interactivate Team the ability to make more regular changes. Now, over a year later, you are looking at version 3.4. Updates have been made, possibly without your even noticing. Find out what's new!

For Students

The release of new activities and discussions is ongoing. Lately, here's what's new:

New/Updated Activities

	Parametric GraphIt: This activity allows the user to plot ordered pairs and parametric equations on the same coordinate plane. The applet is similar to GraphIt, but instead allows users to explore the parametric representation of a function.
	Function Revolution: This activity allows the user to find the volume and surface area of various functions as they are rotated around axes. This applet can be used to practice finding integrals using the disk and washer methods of estimation.
	Incline: This applet allows the user to make observations about the relationship between speed and position and how both of these are affected by initial velocity and the incline on which the biker is traveling.
	Overlapping Gaussians: In this applet you can adjust the parameters on two Gaussian curves to determine if there is a possibility of a difference between the two means.
	Fitted Normal Distribution: This applet allows the user to experiment with randomly generated data sets at various sample sizes and standard deviations. Then, users can compare the distribution of the experimental data to the expected distribution.
	Triple Venn Diagram Shape Sorter: This activity allows the user to explore Venn Diagrams with three circles. Students can sort shapes into known categories or can guess what the categories are by experimenting with sorting.

New/Updated Discussions

For Teachers

The release of new or improved lessons is ongoing. Lately, here's what's new:

New/Updated Lessons

Emerging Patterns: Students consider the patterns that emerge from agent models and geometric fractals.
Polar Coordinates: Introduces students to graphing in the Polar coordinate plane.
Solving Equations: Introduction to various algorithms for solving single-variable, linear equations.
Derivate: Explores derivatives and the idea of infinity using a geometric interpretation of slope.
InteGreat: Students learn about definite integrals through limits and Riemann sums.
Algorithm Discovery with Venn Diagrams: Students discover algorithms as they sort shapes into Venn diagrams. Then, students compare the efficiency of their algorithms using box plots.
Sets and the Venn Diagram (beginner): In this lesson, students explore sets, elements, and Venn diagrams.
Cross Sections: This lesson utilizes the concepts of cross-sections of three-dimensional figures to demonstrate the derivation of two-dimensional shapes.
Conic Flyer Equations: Introduces students to a geometric derivation of the conic sections.
Estimating with Fire: Introduction to various estimation methods through the simulation of a forest fire.
Transformations (Elementary): This lesson shows elementary students how they can know, for certain, that rigid motions like reflections, rotations, and translations create a shape congruent to the original.
Advanced Fire: This lesson plan helps students to understand independent and dependent variables through a fire probability simulation.

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

Shodor constantly aims to improve the quality and user-friendly nature of its applications. In this section, we list applets that have been updated with new features or have had bugs removed.

Development of resources is ongoing, including fixing bugs in existing applets. Frequently, users just like you report problems with our applets, enabling us to improve the resources that are already available. To give us feedback, please visit the Website Feedback form or click on the feedback link at the bottom of any page.