Note to Students and Teachers:
This applet is a copy of one of the ESCOT electronic Problems of the Week at the MathForum from the spring of 2001. The original includes a method for recording student responses and more instructional support information about the activity (including its connection to the parable of six blind men and an elephant).

Note to Developers: The applet linked to above was built with the new GeX component library.  The code was written 'by hand' but could also have been produced in a gui RAD environment. The GX components are JavaBeans, and their development was influenced by a visit with the ESCOT team in the summer of 2000. One difference from the ESCOT approach is that I have not based them on Swing classes  - mainly because of difficulty (for me) in defining a small enough subset of the Swing library to not overly slow down the applet loading process. One cost of this (in addition to having less attractive graphics) is the fact that positioning of components in a gui beanbuilder environment is less convenient, but for applets like this, 'hand coding' is pretty straightforward and the gui approach may not be that big of an issue.