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.
JR
Jeff Rasmussen
Welcome Home to Symynet
http://www.symynet.com
website development
graphic design
=================================================================
Instructions for joining and leaving this list and remarks about
the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES are available at
http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/
=================================================================
