November 23, 2010 Activity Webinar presented by Stacey Hancock, Reed College, Jennifer Noll, Portland State University, Sean Simpson, Westchester Community College, and Aaron Weinberg, Ithaca College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. Extra materials available for download free of charge. Many instructors ask students to demonstrate the frequentist notion of probability using a simulation early in an intro stats course. Typically, the simulation involves dice or coins, which give equal (and known) probabilities. How about a simulation involving an unknown probability? This webinar discusses an experiment involving rolling (unbalanced) pigs. Since the probabilities are not equal, this experiment also allows the instructor to have students think about the concept of fairness within games.
It's Just STATA Code To Me is a song written by Dorry Segev of Johns Hopkins University that reflects on a number of issues in biostatistical data analysis. The song may be sung to the tune of Billy Joel's 1980 hit song "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me." The lyrics were written for Marie DIener-West's Biostatistics 653 course at Johns Hopkins that regularly asks students to create songs, videos, and poetry with biostatistics themes.
This activity uses student's own data to introduce bivariate relationship using hand size to predict height. Students enter their data through a real-time online database. Data from different classes are stored and accumulated in the database. This real-time database approach speeds up the data gathering process and shifts the data entry and cleansing from instructor to engaging students in the process of data production.
Statistic Acrostic is a poem by statistics educator Lawrence Mark Lesser and biostatistician Dennis K. Pearl that covers several statistical concepts using only 26 words (one starting with each letter of the alphabet). It was written in 2008 as a response to an example and challenge from JoAnne Growney in her poem “ABC, an Analytic Geometry Poem” in a 2006 article in Journal of Online Mathematics and Its Applications. To expand the usefulness of this form for educational objectives, a teacher could have students not follow the 26-letter alphabet, but generate an acrostic from a statistics word or phrase.