Author Archives: Tim Erickson

About Tim Erickson

Tim will be teaching statistics in the Math & CS Department at Mills College this spring and is looking forward to the challenge. He also continues to design K-12 curricula in mathematics, statistics, and science.

Students building their own simulations: How hard can it be?

Tim Erickson, Mills College

Joan Garfield tells us that approaching inference using simulation is like teaching students to cook rather than simply to follow recipes.  I’m totally on board with that. In this post, I want to reflect about students can also grow the vegetables—that is, become farmers as well as cooks—and build the simulations themselves. [pullquote]Yet I claim that making students responsible for the hard part is good for learning.[/pullquote] Continue reading