Providing students with opportunities to find their own databases creates an environment of participation and involvement where students experience what it is to do statistics. Creating their own databases also gives students experience with real world problems. In doing so, students can learn to observe and discuss the influence of missing data and outliers as they occur in day to day situations. The author gives an example of how students at University of Wisconsin dealt with obtaining their own data for Buffon's needle problem, and how they analyzed the data. Suggestions for possible activities for students learning statistics include using statistics to estimate how many words are in an article and strategies for guessing on various kinds of multiple choice tests.
The CAUSE Research Group is supported in part by a member initiative grant from the American Statistical Association’s Section on Statistics and Data Science Education