Finding binky

Binky was acquired at Ace Office Supply the weekend prior to laboratory seven.


Binky was triple wrapped in three plastic bags.


Binky was in a tangerine tree this summer.


Location of Binky: up in a tangerine tree

The complication this term was only a single student had an Android phone at class start. 

iPhones can only display degrees, arcminutes, and arcseconds to whole numbers. One arcsecond is 0.016 arcminutes. An Android phone running GPS Essentials can display three decimal places in arcminutes. In theory the Android phone can put one within two meters of Binky, the iPhone Compass cannot do better than 30 meters.


Clayton, with Emars, had the only phone that was running GPS Essentials at class start. He would go on to find Binky. Clayton would quickly sort out the need to move west and was at Binky before I realized he had taken off to the west.

Lost. The students seemed perplexed as to how to go about finding Binky. They did not seem to understand the need to move and observe how the numbers change as they move.


While the class was still over by the generator, Clayton was already moving to the west.  

The complication of there being only a single Android phone among the students is a tough complication to resolve. The iOS compass is too inaccurate. Of course there are apps for iOS, but the lack of an iPhone makes determining which apps might be most appropriate and then developing support materials for the app not possible. 

A second student with an Android phone arrived after Clayton had already found Binky. That is two Android phones among the ten students. One student had no phone. The rest were using iPhones. 

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