A collection of Statistics related Haikus collected by Nicholas Horton from his Math 190 (statistical Methods for Undergraduate Research) course at Smith College in Spring, 2005. These are included in the Statistics Haiku Project at http://www.math.smith.edu/~nhorton/haikustat.html
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.
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.
an old "walks into a bar" joke with a statistics twist.
A cartoon to teach about the use of placebos in experiments. 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.
A cartoon to teach about the importance of blinding the researcher to which comparison group the subjects are in. 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.
A cartoon for use in discussing the issues of causation versus correlation and the assumptions underlying Structural Equations Modeling (SEM) for students who have been introduced to that technique. The idea for the cartoon came from David Lane of Rice University and the cartoon was drawn by Ben Shabad, a student at the Chicago School of Professional Psychology. The cartoon was awarded a tie for first place in the cartoon category of the 2011 CAUSE A-Mu-sing competition. For for use in statistics courses at non-profit institutions.
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.