Statistical Inference & Techniques

April 27, 2010 Activity webinar presented by Shonda Kuiper, Grinnell College, and hosted by Leigh Slauson, Capital University. Educational games have had varied success in the past. However, what it means to incorporate games into the classroom has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. The goals of these games are to 1) foster a sense of engagement, 2) have a low threat of failure, 3) allow instructors to create simplified models of the world around us, and 4) motivate students to learn. This webinar uses the same reaction time game to demonstrate a simple 1- 2 day activity that is appropriate for introductory courses as well as an advanced project that encourages students to experience data analysis as it is actually practiced in multiple disciplines. In the introductory activity students are asked to spend 15 minutes playing an on-line game. Data collected from the game is used to demonstrate the importance of proper data collection and appropriate statistical analysis. The advanced project asks students to read primary literature, plan and carry out game based experiments, and present their results.

A song parody by Steve Sodergren (a.k.a. Al G Bra: see www.reverbnation.com/algbra) that may be sung to the tune of "With or Without You" by U2. Can be used to stimulate conversation about confidence intervals and the typical use of 95% confidence in the media when it is not otherwise reported (i.e. being within plus or minus two standard deviations for intervals based on a normal sampling distribution). This song appears on Al G Bra's "Hotel Califormula" CD.

A movie frame given the statistical caption "Kolmogorov-Smirnov test: many think its still the best, especially for a non-parametric mood." This is part of a collection of statistical captions to accompany art work written by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel that took first place in the cartoon & art category of the 2009 A-Mu-sing contest sponsored by CAUSE. The collection and their accompanying statistical captions discussed in the paper "How art helps to understand statistics" (Model Assisted Statistics and Applications, 2009) by Stan Lipovetsky and Igor Mandel in volume 4 pages 313-324. The still shot came from the 1959 movie "Our Man in Havana" starring Alec Guinness and Ernie Kovacs. Free to use in classrooms and on course websites.

... one of the main functions of an analogy or model is to suggest extensions of the theory by considering extensions of the analogy, since more is known about the analogy than is known about the subject matter of the theory itself. is a quote by English science philosopher Mary B. Hesse. The quote is found in her 1952 paper "Operational Definition and Analogy in Physical Theories" "British Journal for the Philosophy of Science" (1952).