March 24, 2009 Activity webinar presented by Nicholas Horton, Smith College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Otterbein College. Students have a hard time making the connection between variance and risk. To convey the connection, Foster and Stine (Being Warren Buffett: A Classroom Simulation of Risk and Wealth when Investing in the Stock Market; The American Statistician, 2006, 60:53-60) developed a classroom simulation. In the simulation, groups of students roll three colored dice that determine the success of three "investments". The simulated investments behave quite differently. The value of one remains almost constant, another drifts slowly upward, and the third climbs to extremes or plummets. As the simulation proceeds, some groups have great success with this last investment--they become the "Warren Buffetts" of the class. For most groups, however, this last investment leads to ruin because of variance in its returns. The marked difference in outcomes shows students how hard it is to separate luck from skill. The simulation also demonstrates how portfolios, weighted combinations of investments, reduce the variance. In the simulation, a mixture of two poor investments is surprisingly good. In this webinar, the activity is demonstrated along with a discussion of goals, context, background materials, class handouts, and references (extra materials available for download free of charge)
October 10, 2006 webinar presented By John Holcomb, Cleveland State University, and hosted by Jackie Miller, The Ohio State University. This webinar presents a quick overview of assessment methods related to student writing assignments and data analysis projects. Beginning with short writing assignments, Dr. Holcomb progresses through a range of different approaches to projects at the introductory course level. On-line resources containing existing project ideas will be shown along with ideas for creating one's own projects. The webinar also discusses several approaches to evaluating the range of assignments.
This is my take on the ubiquitous M&Ms counting activity. Each student records the color proportions in a fun-size bag of M&Ms. We pool the class data and run a Chi-Square goodness-of-fit test to determine whether or not the color proportions match those claimed on the manufacturer's website. We consistently find that the proportions do not match. The blue M&Ms, in particular, are underrepresented. This activity also includes a review of the 1-proportion z confidence interval.
Probability is a 2 minute 14 second video that can be used in discussing the probability of rare events (e.g. how many consecutive times must a coin land heads before you question whether it is a fair coin?). The video was written, shot, and edited by Sam Rapien in 2007. The music is by Brett Musil and Sam Rapien and the single cast member is Jon Anderson. Mr. Rapien made this video while a graduate student in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.