Fun

A video using dance to teach about the concept of variance involved.  This 2013 video is from the “Dancing Statistics” series developed by Lucy Irving from Middlesex University (UK) funded by a BPS Public Engagement grant and additional funding from IdeasTap.  Full credits are within the video.   The Dancing Statistics project is described at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00050/full

The video also comes with teaching notes for viewing by instructors who are logged into CAUSEweb.org. 

A video using dance to teach about concepts involved with correlation.  This 2013 video is from the “Dancing Statistics” series developed by Lucy Irving from Middlesex University (UK) funded by a BPS Public Engagement grant and additional funding from IdeasTap.  Full credits are within the video.   The Dancing Statistics project is described at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00050/full

The video also comes with teaching notes for viewing by instructors who are logged into CAUSEweb.org. 

A haiku poem that uses a fortuitous numerical fact about a birthday probability that can launch discussion of the "68-95-99.7 rule" and how 99.73% of values are within 3 standard deviations of the mean for a normal distribution. Here 364/365 ≈ 0.9973 (365/366 is the same out to four decimals so this also applies to leap years).  Students can also recognize that birthdays do not follow a normal distribution, but approximately a uniform distribution (so that the approximate chance that two people have different birthdays is about .9973) . The poem was written by Lawrence Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in February, 2021.

A poem to help in discussing matched-pair designs. UTEP Professor Larry Lesser wrote this poem on February 1, 2021, using end-rhyme couplets to convey (literally and figuratively) tradeoffs of a design with matched pairs.  Note that the rhymes are not always perfect, a reflection of how it can be impossible to match subjects perfectly. Also note how the would-be final couplet is ruined by losing its second line, just as you effectively lose two subjects when one subject in a pair chooses to drop out of your study.