Webinars

GOLO is a dice-based golf game that simulates playing a round of golf. GOLO can be used to illustrate basic probability concepts, descriptive summaries for data, discrete probability distributions, order statistics, and game theory. Participants will get a chance to play the online version of GOLO. Participants are asked to pre-register on the GOLO website. Instructions: Go to GOLO website: www.igolo.com Click on Play the Online Version Supply email address and create password

During the past 20 years, undergraduate education has shifted from student as passive recipient of information to student as active participant in the classroom. I wrote an article for Chance magazine's 20th anniversary issue titled, "Using Chance to Engage Undergraduates in the Study of Statistics." The article gave examples of activities inspired by Chance magazine articles from the last 20 years. This webinar will take articles from a recent issue of Chance and demonstrate the ease with which any issue can be used to develop class activities that are fun for high school students and undergraduates whether the course is a basic quantitative literacy course, an AP statistics course, an introductory course for non-statistics majors, or a core or elective course for the statistics major.

This webinar will discuss what it means to understand the concept of standard deviation and share a sequence of activities that can be used to help students develop variability. Particular attention will be paid to one activity that challenges students to work together to consider center and variability together, developing a better understanding of the standard deviation. The activities discussed are accompanied by detailed Lesson Plans, developed through our NSF-funded AIMS project.

A model for probabilistic reasoning will be discussed that may support students' statistical reasoning. The development of the model and instructional implications are based on theoretical considerations and empirical results from work with middle grades students. Significant time for discussion is planned to get reactions to the model as well as to discuss aspects of probability that participants believe are foundational to building statistical literacy or reasoning.

This webinar will describe an activity that uses data collected from an experiment looking at the relationship between two categorical variables: Whether a cotton plant was exposed to spider mites; and did the plant contract Wilt disease? The activity uses randomization to explore whether there is a difference between the occurrence of the disease with and without the mites. The webinar will include a discussion of the learning goals of the activity, followed by an implementation of the activity then suggestions for assessment. The implementation first uses a physical simulation, then a simulation using technology.

In Statistics as in many disciplines, students need to learn about complex concepts and dynamically changing processes. How can instructors help their students begin to "see" these complex topics the way experts do, and are there tools that can help? In this webinar, I will review key findings on how computer visualizations and simulations can best support student learning and then take those findings to generate effective strategies for teaching with simulations and visualizations.

A real-time online hands-on activity database is introduced for teaching introductory statistics. The activity, "How well can hand size predict height?", will be used to demonstrate how to use real-time activity to engage students to learn bivariate relationship. Various other activities can be found at stat.cst.cmich.edu/statact. The real-time database approach speeds up the process of data gathering and shifts the focus to engage students in the process of data production and statistical investigation.

Statistics educators are keenly aware of the value of using real data to help students see the relevance and applicability of statistics. The federal statistical agencies have invested in significant efforts to make data accessible and available. In this webinar, Ron Wasserstein will point you to these resources, discussing their uses and limitations.

An important idea in statistics is that the amount of data matters. We often teach this with formulas --- the standard error of the mean, the t-statistic, etc. --- in which the sample size appears in a denominator as √n. This is fine, so far as it goes, but it often fails to connect with a student's intuition. In this presentation, I'll describe a kinesthetic learning activity --- literally a random walk --- that helps drive home to students why more data is better and why the square-root arises naturally and can be understood by simple geometry. Students remember this activity and its lesson long after they have forgotten the formulas from their statistics class.

This webinar is based on the activity I found at www.lhs.logan.k12.ut.us/~jsmart/tank.htm and other on-line resources (see references). During World War II, the British and U.S. statisticians used estimation methods to deduce the productivity of Germany's armament factories using serial numbers found on captured equipment, such as tanks. The tanks were numbered in a manner similar to 1, 2, 3, ..., N, and the goal of the allies was to estimate the population maximum N from their collected sample of serial numbers. The purpose of this activity is to introduce students to the concept of an unbiased estimator of a population parameter. Students will develop several estimators for the parameter N and compare them by running simulations in Minitab.