An Open Letter to the TinkerPlots Community

March 21, 2014

As you may have discovered by now, you can no longer purchase TinkerPlots. Many of you who have been using TinkerPlots in courses and workshops have found your way to us asking if and when it will be available for purchase again. We expect soon, by this June. But to allow you to make informed decisions about future instructional uses of TinkerPlots, we need to provide a little background.

On December 10, 2013, we received a letter from McGraw-Hill Education giving us notice that in 90 days they would be terminating their agreement with us to publish TinkerPlots. For those of you who remember Key Curriculum as our publisher, McGraw-Hill Education acquired Key in August 2012, and as part of that acquisition became the new publisher of The Geometer's Sketchpad, Fathom, and TinkerPlots.

Though McGraw-Hill Education had informally told us of their plans to terminate sales of both TinkerPlots and Fathom as of December 31, 2013, we were nevertheless surprised when they actually did this. We were assuming this wouldn't happen until mid March (i.e., 90 days). In any case, since January 1 of this year, no new licenses for TinkerPlots have been sold.

Fortunately, TinkerPlots is actually owned by our University, so we are now free to find another publisher. We are in ongoing discussions with four different organizations who have expressed interest in publishing TinkerPlots. But there are many components of TinkerPlots in addition to the application (data sets, activities, help manual, instructional movies, tutorials, on-line course materials, artwork, the license server/installer, the list of existing users), which McGraw-Hill Education does own that would be hard to do without; to replace them would require a significant undertaking. Fortunately, McGraw-Hill Education has indicated their willingness to transfer most all of these assets to us, and we are very grateful for this because they are not legally bound to do so. However, we have not yet received any of these resources or written permission that we can use them. Until we do, we cannot realistically build and release another version of the application. We are in regular communication with people at McGraw-Hill Education who have assured us that they will begin very shortly to deliver to us these materials and official permissions for their use.

We have been telling folks that a new version of TinkerPlots will be available by June 2014, and we still think this a reasonable timeframe. We'd give it about an 85% probability. By August, 98.2%.

In the meantime, if you have unused licenses for TinkerPlots, you will still be able to register new computers on that license number. To see how many licenses you have, go to License Information... under the Help menu. If you have one license, our memory is that you can actually register 3 computers on it — they built in a little leeway. From that same dialog box you can also deregister a computer and in this way free up a currently used license. (We just checked, and when the deregister dialog comes up, it now has the name of Sketchpad where TinkerPlots should be. But ignore that. It's just an indication of the publisher slowly phasing the name TinkerPlots out of its system.)

Also, the resource links under the TinkerPlots Help menu still take you to resources such as movies on the publisher's site. They have told us, however, that after March 2015, they will discontinue hosting these materials on their web site. But by that time, all these should be available on the site of the new publisher.

We are so sorry for the inconvenience this interruption and the lack of communication has caused many of you. McGraw-Hill Education has not notified its existing users, and we don't know who most of you are. We have heard of several instances where teachers planning to start a course or workshop in a few days have suddenly learned that their students will not be able to purchase TinkerPlots, and they have had to quickly redesign their course. We understand that because of this ordeal, some of you will decide to jump ship on TinkerPlots. But we certainly hope that most of you will stick with us through this bumpy transition. We have put nearly 15 years of ourselves into the creation of TinkerPlots and the development of its community, and we are committed to keeping both going.

Cliff Konold and Craig Miller
The TinkerPlots Development Team
Scientific Reasoning Research Institute
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, Massachusetts
Email: konold@srri.umass.edu
Web: www.umass.edu/srri/serg/
TinkerPlots Software Page