By Federica Zoe Ricci, Mine Dogucu
Information
Where do priors come from? Should there only be one correct prior? What can people do with Bayesian statistics in real life?’ These are common questions students have when introduced to Bayesian ideas, and providing satisfying answers can be challenging. We present an activity designed to make students practice the Bayesian sequential-learning framework in a realistic and fun setting, based on the Racer game (from Stat2labs.com). Acting like the analysts of a racing team, students are asked to help their manager decide which type of tires to use for an upcoming race, based both on prior knowledge from their team’s engineers and on data they collect in class by playing the racing game. Some teams discuss with the class: what prior distribution they chose, the data they collected and their posteriors. As some teams received different prior information, students reflect on the legitimacy of choosing different priors and on how they all used Bayesian statistics to quantify uncertainty in this problem. We discuss our experience with implementing this activity for a discussion (i.e., lab) session of an Introduction to Bayesian Data Analysis class with upper-level undergraduates at a research university and the students' perception of this activity as reported in a survey.