Suggestion: Model CCK: Black Box after Function Builder's Mystery screen

[arouinfar]

Logging this suggestion from @kathy-phet here, because there isn't (yet) a repo for a aCCK: Black Box.

Amy,
I with the black box sim -- down the road -- Argenta had a thought based on talking with the teachers she has been working with.
They like the idea of the black box, but find the design of having just one or two simple black boxes limiting and would like to have it be something that students can test themselves on over and over.
So one design approach that came to mind was the function builder (3rd screen) model where you can pick whether you want one two or three mystery functions and then you can explore that function, and then refresh to get a new function generated at the same level of complexity. That way they could have a black box with 2 connections, and then it could randomly generate a resistor, battery, or plain wire in between or something. Just a thought for a potential design as we think about moving this sim to a general phet sim.
Best,
Kathy

Argenta added

And the resistor could have different resistances (or battery different voltages) so that students would be able to practice Ohm's law as well. This was just a suggestion from a few teachers. They also had the suggestion of changing the name of the "Test" scene to "Prototype."

[arouinfar]

In Function Builder, a student can choose to have one, two, or three mystery functions. The refresh button below the function machine will swap out the functions. After three cards have been sent through the machine, the reveal buttons become active.

I think something similar could work for CCK: Black Box. A student could choose to explore a black box with two, three, or four terminals. Instead of populating these black boxes with a truly random assortment of resistors (with various R), batteries (with various V), and wires, we could create a large bank of black boxes for the sim to randomly choose from. The bank of options for the two terminal scene would likely be smaller than the bank of options for the four terminal scene.

We'll also need to think carefully about when the reveal button would become active -- I think the Function Builder analogy breaks down a bit here.