Jumping in to Lists and Numbers
Overview
The following three videos show how R-Instat can be used in a playful way to explore and play with numbers and other lists. Watch the videos and then follow your own interests.
Fun with Lists
Explore lists of information on a wide range of topics and learn how to manipulate them to extract information.
In this data rich world you can find lists on almost any topic. The Rcorpora package provides a wide range of lists on many topics. This activity show you how to use R-Instat to delve deeper into these to extract information and answer questions.
Video script prepared by Rachel Kirk-Gushowaty, and Roger Stern. Video constructed and voiced by Rachel Kirk-Gushowaty.
- 0:00 Introduction to R-Instat
- 0:02 Introduction to Lists
- 0:52 Animal List
- 2:42 Food List
- 3:59 Word List
- 6:17 Planets List
- 7:16 Minor Planets List
- 8:16 Fibonacci Numbers
- 8:49 Prime Numbers
- 10:15 Binary Primes
- 11:09 50 Million Primes
- 13:51 Transform Dialog
- 14:55 Frequencies
- 15:29 Binary Primes
- 15:57 Numbers to Base
- 16:21 Reflection
- 16:48 Literature List
- 21:32 Statistics Quotes List
Now use R-Instat to open and explore lists you are interested in.
Interpreting Large Numbers
Explore the real meaning of large numbers like a googol.
In this activity we use the calculator dialog as a column calculator to generate large numbers. But what do large numbers really mean? After a certain point they can be hard to imagine, we provide some context to help you come to grips with their infinite potential.
Watch this video
- 0:00 Introduction to R-Instat
- 0:06 Introduction to Interpreting Numbers
- 0:17 Basic Numbers
- 1:20 Working with Tens
- 2:23 Interpretation of Numbers of tens
- 4:08 Googol
- 8:10 Factorials
- 12:38 Some interesting Numbers
- 13:18 Prime Numbers
- 14:19 Next Steps
Now use R-Instat to play around with having a column calculator and practice generating numbers yourself.
The Measure of Things is a fun website that helps people visualize the meaning of numbers and quantities by relating them to tangible items. For example did you know that 10 liters is about six times as big as an ostrich egg?
Fun with Sequences
Generate and explore sequences like abundant and super abundant numbers. This activity uses the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequencesand R-Instat to delve into the world of sequences. Searching out patterns and questioning finding to gain a better understanding of them.
Watch the video to see how it is done.
- 0:00 Introduction to R-Instat
- 0:05 Introduction to Sequences
- 0:11 Abundant Numbers
- 3:30 Weird Numbers
- 4:05 Calculate Relative Abundances
- 6:10 Superabundant Numbers
- 6:51 Graphs
- 7:23 Next Steps
(8 minutes)
Now use R-Instat to replicate the activities from the video or do your own explorations.