| Fun with Probability!The Probable Pen in the Cereal BoxProject Narrative |
This document gives a running commentary of the project, from it's inception to closing.
Part I - The Idea
After starting the SatEx course, I must admit was I was very excited about running an Internet-based classroom project, although a bit apprehensive. After all, I have never taught in a classroom younger than junior college, and how could I actually expect to do lesson plans, etc??? I thought and thought and couldn't come up with an idea. I new I wanted it the project to be web-based, but I could not come up with an idea.
That's about the time, in a mathematics curriculum course, that my advisor, Ken Travers, off-handedly mentioned the "Cereal Box Problem" as a classic classroom technique for exploring probability theory. He had our class simulate the experiment, and we had a ball! Imagine 12 graduate students frantically rolling dice, tabulating results and graphing the out come. Quite a site.
About a week later, it dawned on me that this would be an ideal distributed project, and the Fun with Probability! project was born. The first step was to write a project proposal and send it out to my fellow classmates for review and comment. This would then be submitted to a curriculum list-serve in order to garner support. Unfortunately, I was already behind. The mid-semester class meeting had come and gone, and at least 15 classmates had already had their projects accepted by HILITES. One had already received something like 50 responses!
After incorporating my fellow students' comments, I nervously posted my project to HILITES. Because I didn't have the web site created yet (wasn't even sure where I would host it), I decided to ask all teachers to register with me via e-mail. In the project proposal I said that I would respond with the web site URL via reply e-mail. This turned out to be a minor mistake, but I'll get to that later. HILITES is a monitored listserve, meaning that any posting have to be approved by the moderator. Jim and Mike (instructors for my Satex course) had warned us that we should have certain elements in our proposal to insure acceptance. I was pretty sure I had them, but who knew?
Well, nearly a week passed, and I was beginning to get nervous. Most of the other class members got immediate turn-around. Either their project was posted, or they got negative feedback so they could fix it. I needed to know! So on the 29th of March I sent a follow-up e-mail to HILITES. The leading paragraph follows:
To the editor:
I submitted this proposal last Sunday without the recommended template format.
Because I had never subscribed, I wasn't aware of the consistency of the format used in
your submissions. Since then, I have reviewed the archive list on your web site, and
subsequently reformatted my proposal. Please accept this in lieu of the previous
submission.
If possible, would you reply so that I will know you have received this.
Regards,
/Mike Cornell
What a grin that must have provided them. Not three hours later I received this response:
Hi Mike,
The template is recommended not mandatory. All of the elements were in
your project so I posted it. If it is all right with you, I'll hold this
posting until about April 8 and repost it with the new format.
Cordially,
Lorna
What a relief! Not only was it posted, but I got a free follow-up posting to boot! Pays to be persistant! My project appeared on HILITES at 9:50 AM, Friday March 30th.
Now the pressure was on. I had one week to get at least the basics of a web site up. This was so I could send an e-mail to the as yet unidentified project participants, as I promised in the proposal. Where would I host it? I have have a job at NCSA, so that was an option, but I decided to put it on the Education web server. It seemed politically correct, plus it would help to add value to the server. The only was, it was a Macintosh, an operating system I have used, liked and wanted to own, but never purchased.
Well, it turns out that the web server was easily accessed, not only from the education laboratory, but from home, via FTP. Now I just had to post the materials that the teachers would be anxiously downloading in preparation to teach the lesson. Again, I was apprehensive -- I have never written a lesson plan before!!!
Thankfully, one of my favorite grade school teachers was auditing the SatEx course. We cooresponded via e-mail and made a date to put together the curriculum. We met in her classroom at Westview School in Champaign. I must say it was odd to be in my old 5th grade classroom with my 8-year old daughter in tow. What a trip. Anyway, we came up with a neat set of worksheets, as well as instructions for running the project. I went home, wrote up the curriculum, designed the worksheets and posted them to my new web site. I had to put "Under Construction" all over the place and a place-holder for the cereal box logo, but at least I had something. It was 3:00 in the morning (yawn), and the first of many late nights.
Meanwhile, the results were pooring in. By April 6th, one week after the first HILITES posting, I had 37 respondants, all anxious to get started. I sent my first "official" project communiqué:
To: All Fun with Probability! Participants
From: Mike Cornell, Project Coordinator
Subject: Welcome to the Project
First, let me welcome you all to this project. I have received 67 responses so far with
classrooms from about 15 states and three countries outside the U.S. Welcome!!!!
Second, some logistics:
There is a web site (if you don't know what this is, read on) under development for the
dispursement and collection of information. Please visit this site and forward any
comments you have. It will be under construction until a few days before the project
kicks off, so please be patient. The URL is:
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/Students/mcornell/cerealbox/
On this site you will find more information about the project, including lesson plans
(presently labeled teaching suggestions) and some worksheets you can use when you
present the lesson. Please remember that the site is being developed as we speak, so be
patient!!!!
Some classrooms here in Champaign-Urbana will be testing the plans in about a week,
and their recommendations will be implemented prior to the project going "live." At
that point (and you will receive an e-mail at that time), you will want to download/print
the worksheets and get ready to go!!! In the meantime, browse around, get comfortable
with the site, and forward your comments!
Now, if you don't know what a web site is, or do not have access to one, please reply to
mcornell@uiuc.edu or mikec@wordlink.com (I have two addresses) and let me know. I
will forward all information you require via e-mail at the appropriate time.
I ***HIGHLY RECOMMEND*** using the web site if at all possible. It allows you to
make much more interactive use of the project data, as I will be posting updated
graphs and statistics on a nightly basis as the data begins to come in. So,... if you want
some help in getting access (or understanding what that is), please send me an e-mail
and I'll try to help you out.
Finally, due to the nature of this project, the more participants we have, the better. So
if you have relatives or friends who teach in other parts of your system or the country,
give them a call and have them contact me with the appropriate registration
information. We'd love to have them join us. Remember, all I need is their 1) name, 2)
school, 3) grade, 4) class size, 5) city/state/country, 6) date they would participate and
7) (most importantly) a correct e-mail address. They can also visit the site and find out
the required registration information there.
Once again, thank you for agreeing to participate in the the Fun with Probability!
project. I think we will all learn alot from this.
Sincerely,
Mike Cornell
I also began the only completely manual task of the project. I wanted to keep mailing lists of all my registrants, so that I could easily send project update e-mails. This ended up being one of the most tedious tasks I had, because I also wanted to have a spreadsheet that documented classroom sizes, location and region. This required manual data entry, as all of the data came in via e-mails. Next time I do a project like this, even the registrations will be via a web form!!!! The results however, were magnificent.
That night, I was so wound up about the project that I spent about an hour searching for a cereal box on the web. I finally found a 3-D one I liked on some guy's home page. He actually collected the darn things. I downloaded one of his graphics (it was from an ad, so I considered it public domain), wiped out the face with a paint program, and dropped in my own text on the front. I even figured out how to make the text match the perspective of the box!
Fast-forward about two weeks. It is now April 21st, I have recieved (and acknowledged) 82 registrations. I've been slowly adding to the site, creating different versions of the teaching materials (I now have HTML and MS-Word formats), updating graphics, but most importantly, preparing for the acceptance of data. Now I would find out how well I could accept data via a web-site. I created a Lotus Notes database over at NCSA, and got the submission form all set up and tested. The teachers would fill in the data, press Submit, and fire over to the Notes server. The Notes server would save the data, and point the user back to the thank you document back on the Education server.
On April 22nd, I sent out the following message:
To: All Fun with Probability! Participants
From: Mike Cornell, Project Coordinator
Subject: Let's Get Started!!!
We're up to 28 states, 4 countries, 95 classrooms, 2600 students, and one very busy
coordinator! <grin>
The web site is now up and running. The URL is:
http://www.ed.uiuc.edu/Students/mcornell/cerealbox/
On this site you will find more information about the project, including lesson plans
(presently labeled teaching suggestions) and some worksheets you can use when you
present the lesson. Most importantly, you will find the submission form for turning in
your results.
If you don't have access to the web, e-mail me at mcornell@uiuc.edu or
mikec@wordlink.com.
Two final notes:
1. I had a problem with a program compiler, so the simulator isn't quite ready -- real
soon now!!!
2. I will be re-sending this message two more times over the next few days. This is to
ensure that everyone gets a copy. Future copies of this letter will have the subject
(RESEND) Fun with Probability! Project is ready to "roll"! If you've received this
message, you can safely delete without reading it.
Sincerely,
Mike Cornell
Note the reference to the simulator. In my proposal, I had said that if someone wanted to join the project, but didn't have a class, they would be able to participate via simulation. Well, I couldn't get the AppleScript program which I borrowed from George Reese to work for the life of me. He was out of town, and for the first time in my life I was stumped. The simulator would basically roll the die lots of times, and tell you how many pens you bought. Oh well, no one was asking for it yet, and I was busy waiting for my data to come in....
so I waited...
...and I got 3 submissions the very first day. Now it was time to create the spreadsheet so I could start graphing. My first results page! By the 23rd, I already had seven submissions from six teachers (one had more than 20 students, so submitted two pages), and on the 26th I had received 17 submissions.
But all along there were glitches. Some people got broken pipes when trying to connect to the Notes server:
I have been attempting to submit the data for my class for the
probability project using your web submission form. I filled out the
form with the appropriate data and when it click on the submit button
the computer comes back with a "network error: broken pipe" message.
Please let me know what I can do to submit the data
Help!!!!!
AND
I tried again tonight to submit my results to your Web site. I'm not
sure whether or not the first group's results went through. I didn't get a
broken pipe message; the words Server Exception were on the screen after I
submitted the results. But when I tried to send you the second group's
results, I kept getting the broken pipe message. Please e-mail me back and
let me know what you think I should do now.
I kind of expected messages like the following, but didn't get that many...
I'm not very experienced with this!! I just entered my results for 25
students. Did it ever reach you or did I goof? I used the Web. Help!!
Needless to say, it was becoming very frustrating. Everyone was being very patient, but there had to be a more consistant way. Maybe it was because the NCSA server was in the basement? Nah! Who knows. I finally decided to move it all back to the Mac server in the Education building.
On May 1st I went to the Education building, got the CGI script working on the Mac server, and started downloading my results that way. I had to write a macro in Excel to convert the data, but it worked just fine. Now I was on a roll!
Except...
Some people were still having problems. What was wrong now? Most people were ok, but if they had multiple result sets it seemed to die. I got messages like:
Yesterday I posted Probability results for 6 differents groups. I
checked the list today and only my first posting (17 students) appears.
Should I repost the other 5 groups? What's going on?
I got at least 5 of these messages over the next few days. Then, on Tuesday the 7th of May, after taking my only in-class final, it dawned on me! The Thank You form which I had copied from the Notes server referenced the Notes submission form for second and subsequent results sets! Wallah. What was happening was the teacher would send in their first set to the Mac server. It would respond with a Thank You document, and give them a link back to the submission page for more results. But that submission page sent it's results to the Notes server back at NCSA.
A quick check of the NCSA server showed all of those lost results, but by that time, most of the respondents had given up and sent the results via e-mail.
Well, the project is nearly done. With more than 120 submissions, representing over 1600 students and 26,000 die rolls, we did a lot of work in a very short amount of time. I know that this was one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever participated in. I will let the teacher comments speak for themselves. I can't wait until next year!