CODAP-Common Online Data Analysis Platform

By Allison Johnson

Statistics in middle school and high school is often not considered a priority standard and can sometimes be overlooked by the teacher or skipped if the class is behind. Most teachers also do not feel comfortable and confident enough to teach statistics. There are many resources online for teachers to sharpen their statistics skills and better prepare them to teach the lessons.

The traditional way to learn statistics is to use Excel. Excel does have a lot of nice functions and options. It is easy to calculate the mean and median and other numerical values in Excel. The graphing functions in Excel are not so good. The graph function in Excel is not easy to manipulate and it is hard to easily change what is on the x-axis and y-axis. This week in class we learned about a program called CODAP. CODAP stands for Common Online Data Analysis Platform.

I found a lot of things in CODAP that I liked. You can easily rearrange the way the data is sorted by clicking on the title of the column and choosing how you want it to be sorted. It is also very easy to make graphs and customize them. In CODAP when you make a graph you drag and drop exactly what column of data you want on the x-axis and y-axis. You can also delete the data from the graph and drag a new column onto it to make a different graph. You can choose what type of graph such as line graph, bar graph, pie chart, histogram, box plot, etc.  You can adjust the settings on the graph. You can also easily hover over points in the graph and get their exact value.

There are a lot of functions and features to the graphs that Excel does not have that CODAP does have. In Excel, you cannot easily customize and change the graph by dragging and dropping columns. In CODAP you can also make a line of best fit and it will tell you your r^2 value and the equation of the line. Just like Excel, CODAP can also find the mean, median, standard deviation, etc.

Technology is a very useful tool when learning statistics. Personally, I never used Excel until college. In my college statistics class, I had to completely learn how to use Excel. I wish I would have been introduced to it in high school or middle school so I would have a better understanding of what I can use Excel for and how to use it. When teachers are teaching statistics concepts in middle school and high school, I think it would be very beneficial to use either Excel or CODAP. Using these software programs can be a great learning tool to better understand statistics.