Didactic Tool for Intuitive Random Process Visualization

Abstract

The use of educational tools is an essential part of achieving educational goals. All practicing educators have experienced the lack of appropriate illustrative tools. Their use helps students deepening existing or to achieve new knowledge, applicable to other learning situations. Our goal is the development and the presentation of a didactic visualization tool suitable in the intuitive illustration of random processes. This tool visualizes the binomial distribution. It can be used in three variants: a) based on hardware-generated true random numbers; b) based on software-generated pseudo-random numbers; c) also based on pseudo-random numbers, but the probability of the random process is determined by the tilt of the stand. With data from the measurement can be used for further analysis: e.g., using an external program the user can plot the histograms of frequencies, he can calculate the empirical mean and standard deviation of the distribution, he will be able to perform statistical tests etc. The scope of the demonstration is the intuitive visualization of some real-life random processes, when the outcome is influenced by a large number of elemental, practically unobservable random events.