An assignment for Rob Faludi’s class Crafting with Data:
Get to know the normal distribution intimately by building your own quincunx or Galton box. You may use either physical materials or create an imaginative software simulation.
I opted to make a software simulation. It distributes 3,000 beans and both tallies the results and draws them as an upside-down bar chart:
(This video was made in 2017, but the code is mostly unchanged from 2009, except to make it fit better on the screen.)
Links
- ITPindia: Crafting a Quincunx (includes Processing/Java source code)
- Wikipedia: Bean machine