A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about bar graphs. The cartoon is number 373 (January, 2008) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon suitable for a course website that makes use of a boxplot to display an outlier and also uses the term "statistically significant" in its punch line. The cartoon is number 539 (February, 2009) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching the difference between how the word random is used in probability compared to some uses in everyday parlance. The cartoon is number 1210 (May, 2013) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license
An activity to gather data on oranges for use in a unit on descriptive statistics. The idea was presented at the 2019 USCOTS meeting by Katherine Frey Froslie and is described in her blog at https://www.statistrikk.no/2019/05/19/oranges-are-the-new-statistics/
Here students measure how long it takes them to peel an orange (an easy to peel variety is recommended for in-class usage), what the orange weighs (possibly with and without the peel), and how many wedges are in the orange. This creates a data set with both discrete (# of wedges) and continuous variables (time to peel, weight, percentage of orange weight in the peel) to be used for description. Other variables can be added through class discussion depending on student interest. An easy to peel variety of oranges
A cartoon suitable for use in teaching about scatterplots and correlation. The cartoon is number 388 (Feb, 2008) from the webcomic series at xkcd.com created by Randall Munroe. Free to use in the classroom and on course web sites under a creative commons attribution-non-commercial 2.5 license.
A cartoon to initiate discussions about how the correlation is a unitless number that does not change with changes in the units of the variables involved. The cartoon was created in February 2020 by British caetoonist John Landers based on an idea by Dennis Pearl (Penn State) and Larry Lesser (Univ of Texas at El Paso). An outline of a lesson plan for the use of the cartoon is given in a 2020 Teaching Statistics article by Dennis Pearl and Larry Lesser.
A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss the normal distribution and its percentiles. Students could first be shown a copy of the National Center for Health Statistics growth chart graph paper so they will appreciate the details of the poem. And after reading or hearing the poem, students could verify the detail that the 40th and 60th percentiles are half a standard deviation apart. The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss the simplest case of line of fit where the slope and correlation coefficients each have a value of 0. The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The poem can be a vehicle to discuss the terms and language and is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.
This pie chart was created by Lawrence Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso to illustrate how a pie chart can display results of a (qualitative) survey question while intriguing students with (mostly, unexpected) connections between probability/statistics and the number π.