jeff rasmussen said on 9/19/01 11:36 AM:
>Voltolini wrote:
>
>> Hi, I am biologist teaching statistics for biologists and I am
>>
>> very interested in to learn more about teaching strategies
>>
>> when the students hate numbers (like biologists!).
>>
>>
> One thing I recently did was divide the class into 6 groups of ~5 each.
>Each group got a baggy with different stuff: one was multicolored
>confetti, another was different types of pasta, another was different
>lenghts of twine that had an inverse relationship between lenght and color
>saturation. Their task was to Organize, Summarize, Describe, Graph and
>Present the results & also to make the results attractive via Graphic
>Design considerations. The class voted on who did the best job (I was
>quite surprised that the confetti group won since they had little to work
>with in terms of the complexity of the data set). At the end of the year
>after a couple such contests, I'll give the winners a prize... usually
>Godiva Chocolate.
>
> I have a similar exercise where teams are given a "Rube Goldberg" type
>exercise... some of the steps are recoding data, finding miscoded data,
>forming indices, etc and the last step of which is to calculate an F ratio.
> (For non-American, look Rube Goldberg up on the Internet to see what that
>means). I'll see if I can track down the text for that to post.
>
> I'm also working on a computer program called the Art of the Experiment
>that is very light on numbers, so that it will help gently ease
>numerphobics into the wild world of stats. More info on this anon.
You can have them count the colors of candies in bags of M&Ms. The M&M
web site has the expected proportions published so they can do a
ChiSquare test against those proportions.
Do a class of brainstorming to find out what kinds of things they are
interested in. Maybe they want to measure the length of women's hair,
does it vary with color (how do you measure/classify color). What is the
average number of minutes of crying over a set period of time for babies
of students in the class compared to the amount of pollution published in
the newspaper (pollution indexes are published in the Salt Lake
papers)... be creative, have them take their own measurments, discuss
errors in measurment, etc. etc.
Paul
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