Yesterday I attended a fun webinar on Interactive Statistics Education by Dale Berger of Claremont Graduate University. Because I was multitasking (aka “continuous partial attention” — ha ha) at work while attending this webinar my report provides just the highlights. However, you can figure out for yourself what they (the stats dept at Claremont) have to offer by going to this web page offering WISE (Web Interface for Statistics Education) tutorials and applets.*
After the presentation a number of educators brainstormed on interactive stats. David Lane of Rice U (author of many stat applets) suggested the use of “interactive clickers” – see this short (< 2 min.) newscast, for example. I wonder what happen when a majority vote for the wrong answer? For some teachers it might be easiest just to declare the most popular response as the correct answer. That would be consistent with the way things seem to be going in politics nowadays. ; )
*Just for fun try the Investigating the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) applet (click the link from the page referenced above or simply click here). This would be a good applet to provide when illustrating CLT using dice (such as is done in this in-class exercise developed by two professors from De Anza College). In this case, pick the uniform Population and sample size 2. Then Draw a Sample repeatedly, and, finally, just Draw 100 samples. Repeat this exercise with sample size 5 a la the game of Yahtzee (a favorite in my youth). Notice how as n goes up the distribution of averages becomes more normal and narrower. That’s the power of averaging.