LiveCode - Create a Simple Probability App for Mathematics

A few months back I finished reading the latest book by Michael Lewis titled, The Undoing Project. It was fascinating story about two psychologists from the last century. A great part of the book is about how people make decisions and how susceptible we are to making decisions on bogus assumptions.  Once section of the book was talking about probability and that got me thinking about using coding to get students to think about things such as the "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers," etc.

So I quickly coded up a little application with LiveCode (http://www.livecode.org). LiveCode comes in a free OpenSource version, so it is great to use with students and schools.  The little application is just a virtual flipping of a coin to demonstrate what happens in terms of percentages when a person flips a coin and the outcome of whether it will be heads or tails. The little app is very basic and can be used to foster discussions about coding, probability, and can be used to generate data that can be tracked as the number of times the coin is (virtually) flipped.

You will need LiveCode to open the app project and here is the link to the little app, Coin Flipping App.

 All the code for the app is in the "Flip Coin" button. The other objects can be dragged out for the tools palette and named accordingly.

Saving YouTube Videos to Your iPad

Here's a quick little tutorial for saving YouTube videos to your iPad.  Many times it can be challenging for teachers to share YouTube videos with their students when web filters or restrictions prevent the videos from being displayed. An easy way around that problem is to just save the YouTube video to your Photo Collection/Photo Gallery on your iPad. Then you can play the video without needing any Internet access.

In order to to this we are going to use two strategies.

The first strategy is to use one of the existing web sites that allows for downloading YouTube videos.  One of my favorites is http://www.savefrom.net.  If you are on a desktop/laptop computer, you can stop after this strategy. These websites allow you to save the YouTube video directly to your computer’s hard drive.   However, if you are using an iPad, you will need to apply one more strategy. The second strategy will give us the opportunity to use a great application called Workflow (https://appsto.re/us/2IzJ2.i)

(To enlarge images, right click them and open the image in a new window.)

Second strategy is to use the Workflow app and create a new workflow.

Install and then open the Workflow app.

That's it! Your YouTube videos are ready to play directly from your Photos app, no Internet required.