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phetsims / plinko-probability

"Plinko Probability" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Communicating max number of balls being reached, and how to handle further interactions #20

Closed phet-steele closed 8 years ago

phet-steele commented 8 years ago

@amanda-phet on the Intro screen, when reaching the max N=100, shouldn't either the Play button be disabled, or pressing it again return N to 0 and drop more balls? I'd prefer the latter. To me this screen has a "trial" vibe to it, where a student will drop consecutive amounts of 100 balls to compare distributions. To currently do that, the student would either have to press the Eraser or Reset All buttons, then press Play again (a real pain). There have been multiple times after reaching N=100 that I've gone to press Play again expecting 100 more to come out (after returning N to 0 of course). This would be so nice :smile:, but if this isn't a good idea, then there should certainly be some sort of visual clue like the Play button being disabled. Not sure if I'd give my vote to showing the "Out of Balls" dialogue on this screen every single time a max is reached; that would get annoying quickly with how often and quickly a max is reached.

veillette commented 8 years ago

For your information, it would be easy to implement an approach that is different on the "Intro" screen and "Lab" screen. In addition, the Play and Pause button are custom buttons (it is not the scenery-phet PlayPauseButton). In other words, because they are custom to plinko-probability, we have a lot of freedom about the look/behavior we want to use.

amanda-phet commented 8 years ago

In a 6/22 meeting we decided to make the play button disabled until the user clicks erase or reset all.

I will interview on this sim 6/29 and 7/7 so we will get a chance to see how students interpret this!

memo330179 commented 8 years ago

There are two possibilities of when the play button should be disabled. One is when the ball counter has reached 100 balls, and the other is when the user has queued 100 balls to drop.

memo330179 commented 8 years ago

playbutton2 playbutton

amanda-phet commented 8 years ago

@memo330179 That sounds good to me.

veillette commented 8 years ago

We will leave it open as we may get feedback from the student's interview.

amanda-phet commented 8 years ago

In last week's interview of this sim the student clicked reset all to interact again, so this behavior seems to be working.

amanda-phet commented 8 years ago

Since this worked well in an interview I'll go ahead and close the issue.