Applets can be used as quick ways to generate data for students to analyze.
There are times when it is desirable for students to analyze data using
graphs and calculators and to make conjectures as to what the explanation
for the data is. One could, for instance, have students construct right
angled triangles and measure the sides and hopefully after some
analysing come up with a formulation of the Pythagorean Theorem.
While it is definitely instructive to draw a few right angled triangles
it would require a lot of time to draw enough of them to get a table with
sufficient data to analyze. We can use an applet to generate data as in
the example below.
