This week I've been working with Fathom. I came into this week with no idea what kind of program Fathom was. I didn't know if it would be similar to GSP and GeoGebra or similar to another technology program we have been dealing with. Come to find out, it is very similar to Tinkerplots.
Fathom and Tinkerplots have a lot in common. I've only worked with Tinkerplots, the night the guys taught it, but based on the activities they had us do, some of the same characteristics can be found in Fathom. Each program has tabs to drag down tables and graphs. Which I think this characteristic is really nice, especially compared to making graphs and tables in Spreadsheets. It is very easy to move attributes into the graphs x-axis and y-axis, and to make different forms of graphs (such as dot plot, histograms, etc). I really like the way Fathom has directions inside the summary table and graphs to determine where categorical and quantitative data should go in the graph or table.
I think the icons in Fathom are easy to use. All you have to do is click and drag the icon into the sheet and expand the box to make it as large as you want. This aspect makes it much easier to do assignments and work.
Also, from a collection of data, you can click on an individual to get all of their information (for example the census at school). Then, as you work more and more in the sheet, the individual data follows you wherever you are in the sheet, whether you're at the top, middle or bottom. It makes it really easy to drag attributes from this box to graphs, summaries, and tables.
Fathom is an interesting program and seems fairly easy to use, but I'm biased and still love GeoGebra!
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Nice comments about Fathom. The icons and directions are easy to see and the way you describe the way the data can "follow" you in the sheet is really an important feature. The dynamic nature of how everything relates is pretty special. Glad to hear that GGB is still safely in first place.
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