Because of the canvas elements in HTML5, one can now do graphing on the web without having to resort to Flash, Java, or some plugin (I do NOT miss the days of rampant plugins!). I don’t remember how I found out about it (some random stumbling through the web I’m sure), but here are a couple of sites that discuss it:

• Mozilla has a nice tutorial
• W3Schools.com’s description

So last week I decided to do more than simply stumble through the web and started looking for a library that I could use and I found a great one called JSXGraph. After about a week of learning how to use the library, how to dynamically modify tables, and getting some feedback from other people (thank you Dana Nimic!), I think I finally have a nice, generic solution to graphing which will help students do a quick analysis of data.

I didn’t place it explicitly in this site, however. OK, I nestled it in a folder of this site but it’s not really part of my site because I’ve started working on something for lab. We are in the (slow) process of upgrading the computers in lab and a big (ginormous) problem is that all of the programs are specialty ones written specifically to do certain tasks with a command-line interface. I need to replicate the functionality of those programs and I plan on having students access it using a web browser.

Graphing and linear regression (best-fit lines) was the first step...

Here’s the link to the chemistry lab resources.