Resource Library

A game to aid in teaching experimental design and significance testing (especially one sample, two sample, and matched pair situations). Tangrams are puzzles in which a person is expected to place geometrically shaped pieces into a particular design. The on-line Tangram Game provides students the opportunity to design many versions of the original game in order to test which variables have the largest effect on game completion time. A full set of student and instructor materials are available and were created by Kevin Comiskey (West Point), Rod Sturdivant (Ohio State University) and Shonda Kuiper (Grinnell College) as part of the Stat2Labs collection.

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.

an old "walks into a bar" joke with a statistics twist.

A cartoon to teach about the family of t-distributions including their relationship to the normal distribution. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea and sketch from Sheila O. Weaver (University of Vermont). This is part of a three cartoon set that took first place in the cartoon category of the 2007 A-Mu-sing competition. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

A cartoon to teach about the capture-recapture method to estimate population size. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea and sketch from Sheila O. Weaver (University of Vermont). This is part of a three cartoon set that took first place in the cartoon category of the 2007 A-Mu-sing competition. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

A cartoon to teach about the capture-recapture method. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea and sketch from Sheila O. Weaver (University of Vermont). This is part of a three cartoon set from Dr. Weaver that took first place in the cartoon category of the 2007 A-Mu-sing competition. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

A cartoon about the perception that statistics exams are difficult. Cartoon by John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea from Dennis Pearl (The Ohio State University). Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites.

This program has been written to explore the relationship between the data points and the error surface of the regression problem. On one hand you can learn how to represent a line in two different spaces ({x,y} and {k,d}), and on the other hand you see that solving the regression problem is nothing else than finding the minimum in the error surface.

This Haiku was written by Dr. Nyaradzo Mvududu of the Seattle Pacific University School of Education. The poem took first place in the 2007 A-Mu-sing competition.

Those who ignore Statistics are condemned to reinvent it. A quote attributed to Stanford University professor of Statistics Bradley Efron (1938 - ) by his colleague Jerome H. Friedman in a talk to the 29th Symposium on the Interface (May 1997, Houston) and in a paper "The role of Statistics in the Data Revolution" later published in "International Statistical Review" (2001; vol. 69, pages 5 - 10).